WASHINGTON: Death toll in the United States crossed 20,000 and it surpassed Italy on Saturday as the country with the highest reported coronavirus deaths. Figure of the infections due to COVID-19 outbreak is more than 527,111 in the country.
The grim milestone was reached as President Donald Trump mulled over when the United States, which has registered more than half a million infections, might begin to see a return to normality.
The United States has seen its highest death tolls to date in the epidemic with roughly 2,000 deaths a day reported for the last four days in a row, the largest number in and around New York City. Even that is viewed as understated, as New York is still figuring out how best to include a surge in deaths at home in its official statistics.
Public health experts have warned the US death toll could reach 200,000 over the summer if unprecedented stay-at-home orders that have closed businesses and kept most Americans indoors are lifted when they expire at the end of the month.
Most of the curbs, however, including school closures and emergency orders keeping non-essential workers largely confined to home, flow from powers vested in state governors, not the president.
Nonetheless, Trump has said he wants life to return to normal as soon as possible and that the measures aimed at curbing the spread of the COVID-19 disease caused by the novel coronavirus carry their own economic and public-health cost.
In New York, the state’s governor and New York City’s mayor engaged in a fresh squabble over their efforts to combat the virus in what is now the global epicenter, in this instance over how long schools might stay closed.
The state was sometimes slower to impose social-distancing curbs than elsewhere, notably California, while New York’s two most powerful officials, both Democrats, sometimes disagreed over matters of jurisdiction and the best terminology for certain measures.
They have not appeared in public together since March 2.
On Saturday morning, Mayor Bill de Blasio declared that New York City’s public schools would no longer reopen on April 20 but stay closed for the rest of the academic year, saying it was “the right thing to do.”
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, however, later used his widely watched daily news conference to dismiss the mayor’s edict as merely an “opinion,” and say he would make his own decision on school closures.
The current federal guidelines advocating widespread social-distancing measures run until April 30. Trump, who is seeking re-election in November, will then have to decide whether to extend them or start encouraging people to go back to work and a more normal way of life.
The government has said the economy shed 701,000 jobs in March. That was the most job losses since the Great Recession and ended the longest employment boom in US history from late 2010.
With more than 90% of the country under stay-at-home orders, the Christian calendar’s holiest weekend has mostly featured services livestreamed or broadcast to worshippers at home. With many churches already short of funds, untouched collection plates at a usually busy time of the year add pressure on their finances.
A handful of holdout US churches planned to hold in-person services on Easter Sunday, saying their right to worship outweighed public health warnings.
Read more: Death toll by COVID-19 jumps 86; while confirmed infections jumps to 5,077
