COVID-19: COVID-19: 'Matter of life and death', says Trump as US fatality count surpasses 4,000

WASHINGTON: The total US death toll from the coronavirus pandemic topped 4,000 early Wednesday, more than double the number from three days earlier, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University.

The number of deaths was 4,079 -- more than twice the 2,010 recorded late Saturday. More than 40 percent of recorded deaths nationally were in New York state, the Johns Hopkins data showed.

On Tuesday the United States exceeded the number of deaths in China, where the pandemic emerged in December before spreading worldwide.

The number of confirmed US cases has reached 189,618, the most in the world, though Italy and Spain have recorded more fatalities.

After initially downplaying the threat from new coronavirus in the early stages of the US outbreak, President Donald Trump warned of "a very, very painful two weeks" to come for the country on Tuesday.

"This is going to be a very painful, a very, very painful two weeks," Trump told a press conference at the White House. Trump described the pandemic as "a plague."

"I want every American to be prepared for the hard days that lie ahead," he said.

Trump called it “a matter of life and death” for Americans to heed his administration’s guidelines and predicted the country would soon see a “light at the end of the tunnel”.

"I want every American to be prepared for the hard days that lie ahead,” Trump said.

“This is going to be one of the roughest two or three weeks we've ever had in our country,” Trump added. “We're going to lose thousands of people.”

The jaw-dropping projections were laid out during a grim, two-hour White House briefing. Officials described a death toll that in a best-case scenario would likely be greater than the more than 53,000 American lives lost during World War I. And the model's high end neared the realm of possibility that Americans lost to the virus could approach the 291,000 Americans killed on the battlefield during World II.

“There's no magic bullet,” Birx said. "There's no magic vaccine or therapy. It's just behaviors. Each of our behaviors, translating into something that changes the course of this viral pandemic.”

(THE NEW INDIAN EXPRESS)

1479 Days ago