Coronavirus deaths top 60,000 in US. ‘We learned a lot of lessons here, painfully’
Coronavirus has killed more than 60,000 people in the United States, just days after passing 50,000 U.S. deaths on Friday, Johns Hopkins University reports.
After passing the milestone Wednesday, U.S. coronavirus deaths rose to more than 61,000 Thursday, according to the university.
There have been more than 3.2 million confirmed cases of the COVID-19 virus worldwide, with more than 228,000 deaths, according to the university. More than 27,000 people have died in Italy, and more than 26,000 in the United Kingdom.
The United States has had more than 1 million confirmed cases, and around 6 million people in the U.S. have been tested for the COVID-19 virus, Johns Hopkins University reported.
More than 18,000 people have died of coronavirus in New York City, the university says.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that the 2019-20 seasonal flu has killed from 24,000 to 62,000 people nationally. A 2009 swine flu pandemic killed more than 12,000 people in the United States.
More than 58,200 Americans died in the two-decade-long Vietnam war, NPR reported.
But people may be suffering from “quarantine fatigue,” The Washington Post reported. Since the first time since states and cities issued stay-home orders to try to curb the spread of the virus, smartphone data shows more people are venturing out.
“We saw something we hoped wasn’t happening, but it’s there,” said Lei Zhang, lead researcher and director of the Maryland Transportation Institute at the University of Maryland, according to the publication. “It seems collectively we’re getting a little tired. It looks like people are loosening up on their own to travel more.”
Amid growing pressure to reopen the United States for business, Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York said he intends to proceed with caution, The New York Daily News reported.
“We learned a lot of lessons here, painfully,” Cuomo said, according to the publication. “We’re going to be better for it and we’re going to reimagine what our life is and we’re going to improve for this pause.”
The coronavirus outbreak began in December in Wuhan, China, possibly after the virus passed to humans from bats and pangolins, an Asian scaly anteater, McClatchy News reported.
COVID-19, named because it’s a new type of coronavirus first seen in 2019, comes from a family of viruses responsible for the common cold, SARS, MERS and other ailments.
The World Health Organization has declared coronavirus a global pandemic. In the United States, President Donald Trump has declared a national emergency.
This story was originally published April 29, 2020 at 12:39 PM with the headline "Coronavirus deaths top 60,000 in US. ‘We learned a lot of lessons here, painfully’."