The United States has now had the most coronavirus deaths out of any country in the world, the White House coronavirus taskforce confirmed on Saturday. According to a report by CNN, the U.S. surpassed Italy on Saturday morning to have the most confirmed deaths reported during the global pandemic. A tally by Johns Hopkins University shows at least 18,860 deaths in total.
North America is now the global epicenter of COVID-19 — the coronavirus — and the U.S. has suffered the most overall deaths from the virus. Italy is currently reporting 18,849 deaths from COVID-19, with more than half a million confirmed cases in total. New York state alone has more cases than any other country in the world, and it will take time for things to get better here at home.
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According to New York state Gov. Andrew Cuomo, there were 783 deaths from coronavirus in his state on Friday alone. He said that this is not even the highest death toll his state has seen in a single day so far, and that New Yorkers should prepare for things to continue this way throughout the week.
“You can see that the number is somewhat stabilizing, but it is stabilizing at a horrific rate, Cuomo said in a press conference on Saturday. “These are just incredible numbers depicting incredible loss and pain.”
While many pundits have criticized President Donald Trump for the death toll of this pandemic, Cuomo added that he hand his team “have kept politics out of this crisis… I worked very hard to do that. I have no personal politics… not running for anything. I’m governor of New York thank you, and that’s where I’m going to stay.”
Cuomo did deliver some hopeful news about his state as well, saying that the total number of hospitalizations there seems to be approaching its apex. However, he encouraged people there to conitnue social distancing to keep that number low, as it would be easy to experience a backslide.
“The number of hospitalizations appears to have hit an apex and the apex appears to be a plateau. Which is what many of the models predicted, that it wasn’t going to be a straight up and straight down. It was straight up, you hit the top number, plateau for a period of time, and that looks like what we are doing. The hospitalization rate is down, and that’s important. We have more people getting infected still. We have more people going into the hospitals, but we have a lower number,” Cuomo said. For the latest information on the coronavirus pandemic, visit the CDC’s website.
