The United States became the world leader in COVID-19 deaths on Sunday April 12, 2020 aturday, a grim indicator of the country’s status as the global epicenter of the pandemic.
As at Sunday afternoon, the U.S. had recorded about 533,378 COVID-19 cases and 20,601 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University statistics.
The figures showed the U.S. leading all other countries in the number of confirmed cases and fatalities, surpassing Italy’s death toll for the first time. Italy’s total is 19,468 on Sunday day, Hopkins’ statistics showed.
Recall that we had earlier reported that U.S. also became the world’s first country to report more than 2,000 COVID-19 deaths in a single day. The U.S. reported 2,108 fatalities Friday, the world’s highest one-day death toll since the outbreak began in Wuhan China, late December 2019.
New York is the hardest-hit state in the U.S., with Governor Andrew Cuomo reporting Saturday that there were 783 deaths on Friday, raising the state’s death toll to more than 8,600.
To help stem the spread of the virus, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced the city’s public schools would remain closed through the end of the school year for the 1.1 million children in the city’s system.
De Blasio said the decision was “painful” but “I can also tell you [it] is the right thing to do. It will clearly help us save lives.”
The World Health Organization said Saturday that it was examining reports of recovered COVID-19 patients testing positive again in South Korea as they were about to be discharged from hospitals.
Jeong Eun-kyeong, director of South Korea’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told reporters the virus might have been “reactivated” in 91 patients instead of their being reinfected.
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The WHO said in a statement, “We are aware of these reports of individuals who have tested negative for COVID-19 using PCR [polymerase chain reaction] testing and then after some days testing positive again.”
The organization said it was “closely liaising with our clinical experts and working hard to get more information on those individual cases.”
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