US reaches milestone of 200,000 coronavirus deaths
- The United States, on a weekly average, is now losing about 800 lives each day to the virus
- US President Donald Trump said the worst was over: ‘We are rounding the corner’
According to a rolling tally by Johns Hopkins University, more than 6.8 million Americans have been confirmed infected.
The US has had the world’s highest official death toll for months, ahead of Brazil and India.
Overall, the US accounts for four per cent of the world’s population and 20 per cent of its coronavirus deaths, while its daily fatality rate relative to the overall population is four times greater than that of the European Union.
The United States, on a weekly average, is now losing about 800 lives each day to the virus, according to a Reuters tally. That is down from a peak of 2,806 daily deaths recorded on April 15.
Critics say the statistics expose the Trump administration’s failure to meet its sternest test ahead of the November 3 election.
“Due to Donald Trump’s lies and incompetence in the past six months, (we) have seen one of the gravest losses of American life in history,” his Democratic rival Joe Biden charged on Monday.
“With this crisis, a real crisis, a crisis that required serious presidential leadership, he just wasn’t up to it. He froze. He failed to act. He panicked. And America has paid the worst price of any nation in the world.”
Trump insisted on Fox and Friends on Monday that the United States was “rounding the corner with or without a vaccine”.
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But the president has high hopes that the swift approval of a vaccine will boost his re-election chances.
“I would say that you’ll have (a vaccine) long before the end of the year, maybe by the end of October,” he told Fox, adding that his priority was “total safety – it’s number one.”
Trump has set even more ambitious goals, stating that by April of next year, most Americans who want to be immunised would have a vaccine.
Most experts argue that betting on vaccines was not a viable strategy.
Without adhering to masks, distancing and contact-tracing, and without ramping up testing, tens of thousands more could still die before life returns to normal in the US.
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“What we need to do is shift … towards a more screening approach that’s proactive to test asymptomatic individuals,” Harvard surgeon and health policy researcher Thomas Tsai said.
He said the government should approve rapid, at-home antigen tests, which it has been reluctant to do so far, and which would require the government to pay for it instead of insurance companies.
“Covid will be the third leading cause of death this year in the US,” tweeted Tom Frieden, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) under former president Barack Obama.
“The staggering death toll from the virus is a reflection of a failed national response, but it’s not too late to turn it around.”
Only the number of people who died from heart disease and cancer will be higher.
It’s likely that the US actually crossed 200,000 deaths in July, said Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Institute, citing the excess mortality rate.
The initial lack of tests led to an undercount of the virus’ toll.
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“We are the outlier to have been caught totally flat-footed with no testing, and just not learning from mistakes,” Topol added, explaining why the virus continues to kill more than in Europe, despite improvements in how the disease is managed in hospitals.
The southern states of Texas and Florida contributed the most deaths in the United States in the past two weeks and were closely followed by California.
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California, Texas and Florida – the three most populous US states – have recorded the most coronavirus infections and have long surpassed the state of New York, which was the epicentre of the outbreak in early 2020. The country as a whole is reporting over 40,000 new infections on average each day and saw cases last week rise on a weekly basis after falling for eight weeks in a row.
Belgium, Spain and Britain still have higher total death rates per capita than the United States, but were able to partly control the first wave of outbreaks through near-total lockdowns.
Agence France-Presse and Reuters
