US COVID-19 Death Toll Tops 66,000 as States Reopen

The death toll from the COVID-19 in the United States has reached 66,385, according to data collected by Johns Hopkins University, with at least 1,133,070 confirmed cases of the deadly disease.

Concerns over the real death toll being possibly much higher than the official US government numbers have also been recently voiced in mainstream media like The Washington Post and The New York Times.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has warned that the US could be in for a “bad fall” if coronavirus treatments do not start working soon and that the killer virus is not merely going to “disappear from the planet” when lockdowns finish.

US Presdent Donald Trump was repeatedly warned about the dangers of the novel coronavirus in intelligence briefings in January and February. The warnings — more than a dozen included in classified briefings known as the American president’s Daily Brief — came during a time Trump was mostly downplaying the threat of a COVID-19 pandemic.

The United States is currently the nation hardest hit by the coronavirus, with the number of cases and deaths exceeding other nations by a very wide margin. The virus pandemic has had a profound impact on the US economy, which experienced its sharpest decline in over a decade in the first three months of 2020. The total number of first-time filings for unemployment insurance has climbed to 30.3 million over the past six weeks of the forced lockdown due to the COVID-19 outbreak.

A study shows the US is expected to suffer the most COVID-19 deaths. The projection by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington’s School of Medicine suggested that the US is unsurprisingly in first place. According to the IHME study, the country is poised to sustain some 81,000 coronavirus deaths by August. In the worst case scenario, the death toll might even surpass the 136,000 mark.

The White House had projected 100,000 to 240,000 deaths in the United State from the coronavirus pandemic even if current social distancing guidelines are maintained. They suggest if no social distancing measures had been put in place across the country between 1.5 million to 2.2 million people would have died.

Globally, the death toll from the coronavirus has topped 243,800, on Sunday, with more than 3,428,500 people infected worldwide, according to a tally maintained by Johns Hopkins University.