Washington (dpa) - In the United States, more than 10,000 people have now died after being infected with the novel corona virus.
The number of known infections rose to around 350,000 by Monday afternoon (local time), significantly more than in any other country in the world. This comes from data from the American University of Johns Hopkins.
The top health official in the United States, Jerome Adams, had already attuned the Americans to an increase in the death toll. "This will be the hardest and saddest week in most Americans' lives," Adams told Fox News on Sunday. "This will be our Pearl Harbor moment, our 9/11 moment - only it will not happen anywhere, but across the country."
Adams thus referred to events from the past of the United States of America: On December 7, 1941, Japan destroyed most of the US Pacific fleet in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii - the United States had more than 2,400 deaths at that time. On September 11, 2001, a total of nearly 3,000 people were killed in terrorist attacks in the United States, including the World Trade Center in New York.
The United States, a country of 330 million people, is the most affected by the Corona crisis in terms of absolute numbers of people infected. However, the number of cases in individual countries can only be compared to a limited extent due to the different test rates and the expected high number of unreported cases.
Among the countries most affected by Covid-19 lung disease, the university has recorded the highest percentage of corona deaths relative to population in Spain and Italy. In both countries, around 27 people per 100,000 inhabitants died after an infection. In the USA there were 2.9 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, in Germany 1.9. The university's website is updated regularly and therefore shows a higher level of confirmed infections than the official figures of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the US health authority CDC.
Overview of Johns Hopkins University