*A staff member blocks the view as a person is taken by a stretcher to a waiting ambulance from a nursing facility where more than 50 people are sick and being tested for the COVID-19 virus, in Kirkland, Wash. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson)
According to data from multiple sources, as the dreaded Coronavirus (COVID-19) continues to ravage the world, the United States of America has finally overtaken Italy to have the highest COVID-19-related death toll in the whole world.
Tallies by Johns Hopkins University, New York Times and Reuters news agency, have all shown that America had no fewer than 20,506 COVID-19-related deaths. With this, Italy, which used to be top, has fallen one step behind with 19,468 deaths as of Saturday afternoon.
Only on Friday, America also made history by becoming the first county in the world to record no fewer than 2,000 deaths in a single day. As of Saturday evening, there were no fewer than 528,301 confirmed cases of the deadly virus across the country, according to the New York Times database. New York has also remained America’s epicentre with over 180,458 cases, which experts say represents 34 per cent of the total, and 8,627 deaths representing 42 per cent of the country-wide fatalities.
Other states such as New Jersey, Michigan, Massachusetts, California, Pennsylvania and Louisiana follow with no fewer than 20,000 cases each, and 2,183, 1,391, 686, 629, 506 and 806 deaths respectively. Public health experts are warning that the U.S. death toll could reach 200,000 over the summer if stay-at-home orders are lifted after 30 days.
Dogged President Donald Trump has always argued that his country is reporting the highest figures because it is conducting more tests than any other in the world. Data compiled by Worldometer, a reference website that provides real-time statistics for diverse topics, show that America had conducted over 2.6 million tests as of Saturday April 11, 2020 and counting. This is twice higher than tests carried out by Germany and Russia, the closest countries with no fewer than 1.3 million and 1.1 million respectively.
