According to Reuters' tally, the total number of Covid-19 fatalities has surpassed 250,000, marking yet another dark milestone for the pandemic’s global death toll as cases around the world continue to surge past 3.5 million.
The fatality count hit 250,687 on Monday, increasing by some 3,200 deaths in the last 24 hours.
Also, nearly 67,000 new infections were counted in the same period, bringing the global total to 3,573,864, according to data gathered by Johns Hopkins University.
The United States – still the top Covid-19 hot spot – and Europe drove the surge in new cases and deaths.
The US accounted for fewer than 1,000 of the new fatalities, adding 760 between Sunday and Monday evening, the data showed, while the bulk of the rest occurred in Europe, where outbreaks have infected in excess of 100,000 people in at least seven nations – some, like Italy and Spain, crossing 200,000 cases.
In total, the US has counted 68,442 deaths.
Accounting for the eased lockdowns, the new forecast puts the total fatality count far higher than 74,000, the number offered in the White House’s latest projection.
Another alarming projection attributed to the Centers Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was published on Monday by the New York Times, suggesting that new infections in the US could reach 200,000 per day by June, with fatalities expected to jump from 1,750 per day currently to around 3,000.
The Trump administration has challenged the report, however, insisting it was not a “White House document” and had not gone through an “interagency vetting” process. The author of the model has since denied that it was ever meant to be a projection.
“I had no role in the process by which that was presented and shown,” Justin Lessler, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told the Washington Post, noting that he provided unfinished data to health officials as a courtesy but “it was not in any way intended to be a forecast.” RT
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