MORE than 22,000 Americans have lost their lives to COVID-19 last week, setting a record for the second week in a row.
According to a Reuters analysis of state and county reports on Tuesday, January 12, California is the country’s hot spot with a death toll of 3,315 in the week ended Jan. 10, or about eight out of every 100,000 people, up 44% from the prior week.
Meanwhile, Arizona had the highest death rate per capita at 15 per 100,000 residents. It is followed by Rhode Island at 13 and West Virginia at 12 deaths per 100,000 people.
“On average, COVID-19 killed 3,239 people per day in the United States last week, more than the number killed by the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001,” said Reuters in an article.
“Cumulatively, nearly 375,000 people in the country have died from the novel coronavirus, or one in every 873 residents. The total could rise to more than 567,000 by April 1, according to a forecast from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME),” it added.
Last week, the U.S. reported more than 1.7 million new cases of COVID-19.
However, Former U.S. Food and Drug Administration chief Scott Gottleib said the country may start seeing a decline in cases by February.
“By the end of this month, we’ll have infected probably about 30% of the American public and maybe vaccinated another 10%, notwithstanding the very difficult rollout of the vaccine,” he told CNBC on Friday.
Over 1.9 million people from all over the world have died from COVID-19 since the pandemic began.
On Monday, the world marked the first year of China announcing the first-ever death from a new virus that originated in Wuhan.
In its report dated January 11, 2020, China confirmed a 61-year-old man died from an unknown virus. Little is known about the man aside from him being a regular at a Wuhan wet market linked to many of the early cases.
Wuhan and the surrounding province were put under lockdown two weeks after confirming the first death.
A year later, the city of Wuhan has extinguished the virus and residents are reveling in the freedoms they enjoy, as reported by Agence France-Presse.
“Wuhan is the safest city in China now, even the whole world,” 66-year-old resident Xiong Liansheng told AFP.
