US Covid death toll climbs again after cases surge in sunbelt states

THE coronavirus death toll in the US has started to climb again as the recent surge in cases in the sunbelt states feeds through into fatalities.

At least 867 people died of Covid-19 on Thursday in the US and the crucial seven-day average has begun to climb after falling steadily since mid-april, when deaths first peaked at more than 2,000 a day.

For several weeks President Donald Trump has been blaming the country’s surging case numbers on the availability of more tests and has suggested that test capacity should be cut to reverse the trend.

However, intensive care wards have been filling up across the sunbelt states from Florida to California and now, as had been predicted by experts, deaths have started to climb again. The trend bodes ill not just for those caught up in the outbreak, the bulk of whom are from poor and BAME communities, but for the president himself who is hoping to be elected for a second term in November.

In terms of recorded cases, the US has become the worst-affected coun- try, with more than 3.1 million diagnosed Covid-19 cases and at least 133,291 deaths since the crisis started in January.

The US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) predicts the nation’s coronavirus death toll will rise to between 140,000 to 160,000 deaths by August.

The trend is predicted to continue unless social distancing can be effectively reinstituted across the south and mid-west of the country.

“As predicted, a month from the case surge started, we are moving to a higher death rate in the US,” tweeted Dr Eric Topol, a Professor of Molecular Medicine at the Scripps Research Institute in California. “I think the shift to younger patients and better treatments will lead to a flatter slope compared with April. But thwarting the surge could have prevented this altogether.”

The rise in deaths comes as the leading public health expert in the US, Dr Anthony Fauci, said he had not briefed the president for two months, and he last saw him in person on June 2. In an interview with the Financial Times, Dr Fauci said he was “sure” the information shared at his meetings with the vice-president’s coronavirus task force was being passed to Mr Trump.

Discussing rising case numbers, he said: “What worries me is the slope of the curve. It still looks like it’s exponential.”