Deaths in the United States due to coronavirus pandemic has topped 62,000 as of Thursday.
The outbreak is the deadliest one since 1967. The worst flu season in recent years was in 2017-2018 when more than 61,000 people died in the US, according to the CDC. The only deadlier flu seasons were in 1967 when about 100,000 Americans died, while nearly 116,000 died in 1957 and 675,000 died in the US in 1918 due to Spanish flu.
The number of infected people crossed the dreadful one million mark on Wednesday, making up nearly one third of the global cases.
The outbreak could take nearly 73,000 US lives by August 4, compared with an earlier forecast of over 67,600, according to the University of Washington’s predictive model.
The pandemic has now killed more than 227,000 people worldwide with more than 3.1 million people been diagnosed with COVID-19.
The state of New York alone has reported 23,780 deaths. At least 306 people died on Wednesday in the state, which is down from the 330 on Tuesday and 335 on Monday.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has said that contact tracing, i.e. tracking those who came into contact with coronavirus patients, is key to curb the coronavirus infection rate.
“It’s not rocket science to do it on an individual basis. The problem is the scale that we have to do this at,” Cuomo said. “It will require, under any estimate, a tracing army to come up to scale very, very quickly.”
The pandemic continues to wreak havoc on the world’s largest economy, with more than 30 million Americans have sought US unemployment aid since coronavirus hit. Economists forecast that the unemployment rate for April could go as high as 20 percent.
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