Covid-19: more than 200,000 deaths in USA

Shafaq News / Six weeks before the US presidential elections, since the beginning of the outbreak, the fatality toll of Covid-19 in the United States has exceeded two hundred thousand, according to Johns Hopkins University, as the virus continues to led to hundreds of deaths daily in the country.

The reference tally of the Baltimore-based University listed today Tuesday 200,005 deaths out of 6.9 million infections which makes Corona virus the third cause of death in the United States.

"Covid will become the third cause of death this year in the United States, surpassing accidents, cardiac arrest, and Alzheimer's disease (dementia) behind cancer and cardiovascular diseases," said Tom Frieden, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In the last seven days, 5,300 people died in the United States as a result of the epidemic, compared to 2000 in the European Union, according to data collected by AFP based on official sources.

Relative to the total population, the daily death toll in USA is four times that of Europe.

According to the "Covid Tracking Project", 6000 cases are inpatients, of which 1500 admitted to ICU.

The epidemic does not seem to be at the center of the concerns of US President Donald Trump, who is campaigning for a second term FOR US presidency.

Despite the high rate of infections, Trump does not intend to impose new restrictions unlike Europe.

Trump is betting to have a vaccine by the end of October.

"We will distribute the vaccine, we will overcome the virus, we will put an end to the pandemic and we will enter into an unprecedented new era of prosperity, cooperation and peace," he said via video in the United Nations General Assembly.

However, the amount of doses of the expected vaccine will be very limited in the first months. But by the second semester of 2021, sufficient doses will be produced to vaccinate 330 million Americans, knowing that all these estimates indicate that, at the current rate, the United States will record, until then, hundreds of thousands of deaths.

On Monday, the Democratic candidate, Joe Biden, Trump's opponent in the presidential elections, said that "USA paid the most expensive price compared to the rest of the world."

The Democratic candidate added, "Because of Donald Trump's lies and incompetence in the last six months, we have suffered the most severe losses in American history."

At the beginning of the pandemic, Trump downplayed its severity, hiding from Americans in February that he knew that the virus was transmitted in the air and that it was more dangerous than influenza, according to statements he made in a series of interviews with journalist Bob Woodward.

As for the hypothesis of transmission through small droplets that float in the air for minutes or hours, which is being adopted by a number of studies, neither the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention experts nor the World Health Organization so far consider it a basic hypothesis.

On Monday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that it had deleted this information after it was published "by mistake."