Six weeks before the presidential election, the United States recorded its 200,000th death attributed to Covid-19 on Tuesday, September 22, according to Johns Hopkins University, with the coronavirus continuing to kill hundreds of Americans every day.
Live: LIVE - Coronavirus: more than 200,000 dead in the United States
The benchmark balance of the Baltimore-based university showed 200,005 deaths on Tuesday morning, out of 6.9 million cases in the country, the hardest hit in the world.
A mortality that several models had anticipated since August.
"
Covid will be the third leading cause of death this year in the United States, more than accidents, strokes and Alzheimer's,
" tweeted Tom Frieden, former director of the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC).
"
We underestimate this virus at our peril, and at the peril of those whom our decisions affect
".
Only cancers and cardiovascular disease are expected to kill more than Covid-19 this year in the country.
Even if the real toll of the virus is underestimated due to the lack of tests at the start of the pandemic.
Over the past seven days, around 5,300 people have died from the virus in the United States, compared to some 2,000 in the European Union, according to data compiled by AFP from official sources.
Reported to the population, the coronavirus kills four times more each day in America than in Europe.
At least 6,000 patients are hospitalized in an intensive care unit, and 1,500 on life support, according to the Covid Tracking Project.
In campaign
As the virus is more distributed geographically than in the spring and does not cause the scenes of overwhelmed hospitals that we saw in New York then, it does not appear at the center of the concerns of Donald Trump, who is campaigning for his re-election. November 3.
The US president is focused this week on the choice of the judge or judge to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the Supreme Court, after his death on Friday.
As for the pandemic, despite the very active circulation of the virus in the center of the United States, the leader does not envisage new restrictive measures as elsewhere in the world, in particular in Europe where the epidemic is starting again.
He is betting on the approval of a vaccine by the end of October.
"
We will distribute a vaccine, we will defeat the virus, we will end the pandemic and we will enter an unprecedented new era of prosperity, cooperation and peace,
" Donald Trump said on Tuesday in a pre-recorded message for the Assembly General of the UN.
The number of doses of a possible vaccine will however be very limited in the first months.
By the second quarter of 2021, when in theory enough doses will have been manufactured to immunize 330 million Americans, everything indicates that at this rate, several tens or hundreds of thousands of Americans could still die.
"
America has paid a higher price than any other country in the world,
" Joe Biden, his Democratic opponent for the White House, said on Monday.
"
Because of Donald Trump's lies and incompetence over the past six months, we have suffered some of the most serious losses in American history
."
The president publicly played down the severity of the pandemic from the start, hiding from Americans in February that he knew the virus was airborne and more dangerous than the flu, according to interviews at the time. with reporter Bob Woodward.
His government halted a plan for the general distribution of masks prepared by the US Post Office, and forced the once prestigious CDC to water down their instructions to encourage a return to normalcy.
Latest episode of cacophony: The CDC wrote on their site on Friday that the coronavirus was mainly transmitted by "
respiratory droplets or small particles, such as those in aerosols, produced when an infected person coughs, sneezes, sings, speaks or breathe
”.
The hypothesis of transmission by microdroplets remaining airborne for minutes or hours, supported by a growing number of studies, was not heretofore recognized as primary by experts at CDC or the World Health Organization.
But on Monday, the CDC withdrew the text, arguing that it had been posted "
by mistake
".
