WASHINGTON: United States recorded the most coronavirus deaths in a single day with more than 2,200 fatalities that brought the total number of fatalities to about 25,757, said a report of John Hopkins University.
New York City, the hardest hit US city, revised its official COVID-19 death toll sharply higher to more than 10,000 on Tuesday, to include victims presumed to have perished from the lung disease but never tested.
The new figure of confirmed and probable COVID-19 deaths, released by the New York City Health Department marked a staggering increase of over 3,700 deaths formally attributed to the highly contagious illness since March 11.
The city’s revised count, 10,367 in all, raised the number of coronavirus deaths nationwide to more than 28,300, New York accounting for the biggest share of deaths.
The 60 per cent spike in reported deaths underscored the enormous losses endured in the nation’s most populous city, where the sounds of wailing sirens have echoed almost non-stop through largely empty streets for weeks.
With only a tiny fraction of the US population tested for coronavirus, the number of known infections climbed to more than 600,000 as of Tuesday, according to a running Reuters tally.
US public health authorities have generally only attributed deaths to COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the novel coronavirus, when patients tested positive for the virus.
New York City’s Health Department said it will now also count any fatality deemed a “probable” coronavirus death, defined as a victim whose “death certificate lists as a cause of death ‘COVID-19’ or an equivalent.”
The new approach in New York City could pave the way for similar policies elsewhere across the country, possibly leading to a surge in reported US coronavirus mortality.
Even before Tuesday’s revision in New York City, the number of new US deaths on Tuesday had reached at least 2,228, the highest toll yet in a single 24-hour period.
Louisiana, another coronavirus hot spot, and California also reported record daily spikes in deaths on Tuesday, despite tentative signs across the country in recent days the outbreak was beginning to ebb.
New York Governor Mario Cuomo, whose state’s healthcare network was strained to breaking point by a wave of COVID-19 hospitalizations, had said on Monday it appeared “the worst is over.”
Health officials have cautioned that death figures are a lagging indicator of the outbreak, coming after the most severely ill patients fall sick, and do not mean stay-at-home restrictions are failing to curb transmissions.
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