Coronavirus deaths top 70,000 in United States. ‘We’re not out of the woods’
Coronavirus has killed more than 70,000 people in the United States, less than a week after passing 60,000 U.S. deaths on Wednesday, Johns Hopkins University reports.
The university reported the U.S. death toll had reached 70,115 as of 1:33 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday. By Wednesday morning, 71,078 had died.
There have been 3.6 million confirmed cases of the COVID-19 virus worldwide, with more than 258,000 deaths, according to the university. More than 29,000 people each have died in Italy and the United Kingdom.
The United States has had more than 1.2 million confirmed cases, and around 7.5 million people in the U.S. have been tested for the COVID-19 virus, Johns Hopkins University reported.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that the 2019-20 seasonal flu has killed from 24,000 to 62,000 people nationally. A 2009 swine flu pandemic killed more than 12,000 people in the United States.
More than 58,200 Americans died in the Vietnam War, NPR reported.
The CDC on Friday listed a provisional coronavirus death toll of 37,308 for the United States as of April 25 based on death certificate data, which the agency notes often are delayed and can lag up to two weeks behind actual death tolls in a pandemic.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York warned “we’re not out of the woods” when it comes to coronavirus in a Sunday press briefing, CNN reported.
“My gut says the weather is going to warm, people are bored, people want this over,” Cuomo said, according to the network. “They see the numbers going down. They can take false comfort.”
“We never said it was over,” he continued, CNN reported. “We said the numbers are going down. Roughly a thousand new people a day walk into the hospitals.”
More than 25,000 people have died of coronavirus in New York, Johns Hopkins says.
“The pandemic remains a public health emergency of international concern,” said Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, according to The New York Times.
The coronavirus outbreak began in December in Wuhan, China, possibly after the virus passed to humans from bats and pangolins, an Asian scaly anteater, McClatchy News reported.
COVID-19, named because it’s a new type of coronavirus first seen in 2019, comes from a family of viruses responsible for the common cold, SARS, MERS and other ailments.
The World Health Organization has declared coronavirus a global pandemic. In the United States, President Donald Trump has declared a national emergency.
This story was originally published May 5, 2020 at 1:56 PM with the headline "Coronavirus deaths top 70,000 in United States. ‘We’re not out of the woods’."