NYC reports zero Covid-19 deaths
WASHINGTON: New York City reported zero Covid-19 deaths on Sunday for the first time since the start of the pandemic in April even as Florida became the new epicentre of the US outbreak with a record number of new infections in 24 hours.
New York City, which was at one point the epicentre of the global pandemic, reported no deaths on Sunday, marking a major milestone in its recovery.
The city has had 215,924 cases and 18,670 deaths. At its worst, there had been harrowing accounts of overwhelmed hospitals and mass burials.
The political acrimony over the pandemic continued unabated. President Donald Trump on Monday retweeted a post that accused the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), spearheading his administration’s fightback against the virus, of “lying”. The original post from former game show host Chuck Woolery said: “The most outrageous lies are the ones about Covid 19. Everyone is lying. The CDC, Media, Democrats, our Doctors, not all but most, that we are told to trust.”
Trump then retweeted an April post from Woolery’s podcast co-host that said Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, wants to require “an ID card to go shopping.”
Over the weekend, the White House distributed lists of statements Fauci had made early in the pandemic that turned out to be wrong as understanding of the disease developed, according to media reports.
Trump has been in a hurry to get past the epidemic in a bid to minimise its impact on his re-election chances in November.
But Florida, a Republicanruled state that struck a defiant note early on as New York and other states had been crushed by spiraling cases and deaths, has become the new epicentre of the surge. It recorded more than 15,000 new cases on Sunday, a one-day record for the country.