The United States exceeded 400,000 Deaths from COVID-19

The United States exceeded 400,000 deaths from COVID-19 on Tuesday, according to the latest count from Johns Hopkins University, used as a reference to monitor the progress of the pandemic globally.

The figure is the highest globally and almost double that of Brazil, second on the gloomy list with just over 210,000 deaths.

The North American country also has the highest number of positive cases registered. As of Tuesday afternoon, it has reported about 24.1 million.

Despite the fact that New York is no longer the state with the highest number of infections, it is still the worst hit in terms of deaths in the United States.
 

The country reached the symbolic figure in the last day of the presidency of Donald Trump. It took just under a year to do so, considering that the first death attributed to the disease was registered in early February 2020.

Total lives lost, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University, it is almost equal to the number of Americans killed in World War II. Equivalent to the population of cities like Tulsa, Oklahoma; Tampa, Florida; or New Orleans. It is also equivalent to the attendees at Woodstock in 1969.

It is little less than 409,000 Americans estimated to have died in 2019 from stroke, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, flu and pneumonia combined.

Health workers transport bodies of people killed by COVID-19 in the US. 

The threshold of 300,000 deaths was passed just a month ago, in mid-December. The United States is, according to official reports, by far the most affected nation in the world in absolute terms, but some other countries register more deaths in proportion to their population, such as Italy, the United Kingdom or Belgium.

And the virus has not disappeared in the United States yet, not even with the arrival of the vaccines that could end the pandemic: a model widely cited by the University of Washington projects the death toll to reach nearly 567,000 by May 1.

Although the Trump administration has been credited with Operation Warp Speed ​​- a program to rapidly develop and distribute coronavirus vaccines -, Trump has repeatedly downplayed the threat, mocked the use of masks, criticized lockdowns, promoted unproven and unsafe treatments, undermined scientific experts and expressed scant compassion for victims.

Donald Trump. 

Even his own personal combat with COVID-19 did not seem to affect him.

The White House defended the action of the outgoing government

On Tuesday, meanwhile, Biden announced that he will not lift international travel restrictions as of January 26 from Europe and Brazil as outgoing President Donald Trump announced on Monday.

As Jen Psaki, his future spokesperson, specified: “On the advice of our medical team, the (Biden) Administration does not plan to lift these restrictions on January 26. In fact, we plan to strengthen public health measures on international travel to further mitigate the spread of covid-19 ″.

Jen Psaki 

“With the pandemic worsening, and more contagious variants emerging around the world, this is not the time to lift restrictions on international travel,” Psaki added.