COVID-19 has now claimed the lives of over 100,000 people in the United States in less than four months, CNN reports. An average of 900 Americans have died every day from the virus. This staggering total doesn’t even take into account some individuals who passed away at home from complications related to the coronavirus, but were never able to get access to a test, despite showing symptoms.
In early April, the White House projected that between 100,000 and 240,000 Americans would die from COVID-19. If the death toll were on the lower end of that scale, which is where we are now, Donald Trump said that he would consider his administration did a "very good job" in its response to the pandemic. "If we can hold that down, as we’re saying, to 100,000 ... we all, together, have done a very good job," Trump said.
The next closest country in deaths related to COVID-19 is the UK with over 37,000. The United States is also well ahead of every other country in confirmed coronavirus cases with 1.7 million, as Brazil sits a distant second at more than 400,000.
As the coronavirus death toll in the U.S. continues to steadily rise, states across the country are beginning to push towards reopening businesses. While the expectation heading into this phase was that Americans would encounter a "new normal" where social distancing was still being practiced, and masks were being worn in public, the lessons learned from the past don't appear to be influencing our future.
CDC director Robert Redfield warned Americans last month of a possibly worst second wave of COVID-19 coming later this year. "There’s a possibility that the assault of the virus on our nation next winter will actually be even more difficult than the one we just went through," Redfield said. "And when I’ve said this to others, they kind of put their head back, they don’t understand what I mean. We're going to have the flu epidemic and the coronavirus epidemic at the same time."
