US Surpasses Italy To Record World’s Highest COVID-19 Fatalities

More than 20,000 people in the US have been killed due to COVID-19 according to the latest data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

Washington| The US overtook Italy as the country with the highest deaths due to COVID-19 on Saturday as authorities world-wide urged people to maintain lockdowns despite the Easter holiday weekend.

The unfortunate milestone comes soon after the US became the first nation to record over 2,000 virus deaths in a single day.

The United States, which has now become the outbreak’s centre of gravity after China and Italy, on Saturday exceeded the total number of cases in Italy and Spain as the country’s confirmed cases reached 527,111.

Almost half the deaths in the US are in New York City. New York state on Saturday reported 783 more deaths, for a total of over 8,600.

Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, said on Saturday that the state’s death toll seemed to be stabilising “but stabilizing at a horrific rate.”

Stating a 24-hour figure of 783 new deaths, he noted the last several days had seen around the same number.

Also Read: India In Last 24 Hours Records 1,035 COVID-19 Positive Cases And 40 Deaths

New York state has become the epicentre of the outbreak in the US, reporting over 180,000 of the country’s nearly 530,000 cases.

As of early Sunday, Italy had reached 19,468 coronavirus deaths while the US had 20,608, according to the Johns Hopkins tally.

The number of confirmed novel coronavirus cases across the globe on Saturday surpassed 17 lakh and the death toll continued to surge as more people lost their lives from the highly infectious and deadly COVID-19.

Three months ago the first death from coronavirus was reported in China, a total of 108,702 people have been killed due to the virus, according to the tally kept by Johns Hopkins University.