(Washington) The United States exceeded 900,000 deaths from COVID-19 on Friday since the start of the pandemic, according to the report from Johns Hopkins University.
Updated yesterday at 9:41 p.m.
The country had crossed the threshold of 800,000 deaths in mid-December, only a month and a half ago.
Since then, the United States has been confronted with the wave linked to the Omicron variant, which has caused record levels of contamination.
Cases are now down, but the number of daily deaths continues to grow, with an average of 2,400 deaths per day currently, according to data from health authorities.
And the number of hospitalizations “remains high, pushing our healthcare capacities and our health personnel to their limits in certain regions”, underlined Wednesday during a press conference Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Prevention and Fight. Against Diseases (CDC), the main federal health agency.
Deaths generally occur a few weeks later than contamination, explaining this discrepancy between the curve of cases and deaths.
“Today our country takes another tragic step,” President Joe Biden said in a statement, paying tribute to the 900,000 Americans who died and their families.
“We now have more tools than ever to save lives and fight this virus,” he added, once again urging his compatriots to get vaccinated or receive their booster dose.
The deaths continue to pile up as highly effective vaccines are widely available in the country, where only 64% of the population is fully immunized.
In absolute terms, the United States is the country with the most deaths, ahead of Brazil and India, according to official figures released by the authorities.
The pandemic has officially killed at least 5.7 million people worldwide since the end of December 2019, according to a report established by AFP on Friday midday.
But according to the World Health Organization (WHO), the actual toll could be two to three times higher.