Covid-19 fatalities in US top World War-II deaths
Prez Biden warns the worst of the pandemic is still to come
Washington, Jan. 21: 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 and has now spread to more than 60 nations, the World Health Organization said Wednesday.
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 WWII.
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.
Biden's point-man for fighting the pandemic, Jeff Zients, said the US would also rejoin the WHO, reversing his predecessor's decision. He added that top US expert Anthony Fauci would lead a delegation to the WHO executive board meeting on Thursday. The announcement came as the WHO confirmed that the virus variant first detected in Britain had spread to more than 60 countries, while one that emerged in South Africa has made it to 23. The South African variant is more contagious than earlier ones, experts have warned.
Both have tempered optimism that mass vaccination will help to end the unpopular restrictions such as shutdowns that have wrecked
economies around the world.
There was some good news, however, with early results from two studies on the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine showing it is effective against the British variant, which is fuelling a surge that has overwhelmed UK hospitals. “When you go into a hospital... in some cases it looks like a war zone,” the British government's chief scientist, Patrick Vallance,
told Sky News. Britain is mounting a massive vaccination drive, that has involved the repurposing of all kinds of large buildings -- including Salisbury Cathedral, where thousands of elderly people are receiving shots.
Two musicians worked in shifts throughout the day on its 19th-century organ, playing soothing pieces by composers including Bach and Dvorak.