US virus deaths top American fatalities from World War II
WASHINGTON: New US President Joe Biden warned the worst of the pandemic is still to come, as the number of American coronavirus deaths surpassed the country’s troop fatalities in World War II.
Coronavirus cases have surged past 96 million worldwide, fuelled by the emergence of new variants including one that was first detected in Britain.
The United States remains the worst-hit country, with around a fifth of the two million global Covid-19 deaths, and Biden has made the fight against the pandemic his administration’s top priority.
“We need all our strength to persevere through this dark winter. We’re entering what may be the toughest and deadliest period of the virus,” Biden said at his inauguration, where those in attendance wore face masks and social distancing was enforced.
A Johns Hopkins University tracker on Wednesday showed that 405,400 people have died from the disease, more than the 405,399 total US combat and non-combat deaths in WW II.
Among the Biden administration’s targets is to inoculate 100 million Americans in 100 days, hoping to revive a vaccine rollout that had floundered in the last weeks of the Trump presidency.
E-commerce titan Amazon on Wednesday offered its vast logistics infrastructure to help with that effort.
The US under President Biden intends to join the COVAX vaccine facility that aims to deliver vaccines to poor countries, his chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci told the World Health Organization (WHO) on Thursday.
WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus welcomed the announcement to the WHO Executive Board, saying: “This is a good day for WHO and a good day for global health.”
Meanwhile, China’s commercial hub of Shanghai reported its first locally transmitted cases in two months on Thursday, underscoring the growing risk of the virus spreading elsewhere.
China plans to impose strict Covid testing requirements during the Lunar New Year holiday season, when tens of millions of people are expected to travel, as it battles the worst wave of new infections since March 2020.