The United States suffered another sad day on Wednesday amid chaos on Capitol Hill, with the daily number of coronavirus deaths in the country being the highest recorded in any country during the course of the pandemic.
The daily number of 3,865 people on January 6 marked the fourth day in three weeks in which more than 3,500 Americans died of coronavirus-related complications. More than 30,000 people have died since Christmas Eve, Johns Hopkins data show.
The death toll in the United States exceeded 350,000 on Sunday, prompting a leading infectious disease expert – and a marginalized member of the White House pandemic response task force – Dr. Anthony Fauci to issue an implicit rebuke to Donald Trump, who stated in tweets that morning that the case numbers were being overstated and deaths attributed wrongly.
“Go to the trenches,” Fauci told NBC’s Meet the Press. “Go to the hospitals, go to the intensive care units and see what’s going on. These are real numbers, real people and real deaths. “
US health officials warned on Wednesday that Arizona has become Covid’s “hot spot in the world”, five months after Trump considered the US state’s response to the pandemic exemplary.
“It is already much worse than July, and it will continue to get worse. We are probably two weeks late in LA in terms of our situation, ”said Will Humble, head of the Arizona Public Health Association, referring to Los Angeles County, where an outbreak of coronavirus created an oxygen shortage. The situation caused ambulance teams to stop transporting patients who were unable to revive in the field, with one in 119 people in the state testing positive last week.
Arizona, which now has the worst coronavirus diagnosis rate in the country, recorded a three-digit number of new virus-related deaths for the second consecutive day and more than 7,200 daily cases, according to health officials.
As hospitals are increasingly faced with overload, pressure is increasing to introduce more vigorous control measures, such as mandatory masks across the state.
With more than 21 million cases and 361,123 deaths, the United States is responsible for one in four infections and one in five deaths worldwide. The total number of global coronavirus cases is 87 million, with 1.9 million people dying in just over a year since the pandemic began.