The coronavirus pandemic has now killed at least 1 million people worldwide. That’s according to a tally maintained by Johns Hopkins University. This sobering milestone was reached just nine months after the first reported fatality in China last January. And public health experts believe the actual toll – the recorded deaths plus the unrecorded deaths – is much higher. What’s more, in the five worst-off countries, the trend line remains worrisome. Here’s how they line up — and why Argentina could soon join their ranks.
1. United States
Take the United States, which currently leads the world in terms of both total number of dead and total number of infected over the course of the pandemic. While several Northeastern states that were clobbered by the virus early on managed to use social distancing and masking to push down their new cases by early spring, states in other regions then quickly moved to re-open. This fueled an even bigger wave of deaths across wide swaths of the U.S. throughout the summer. Since then many states have managed to bring down their numbers — as well as the overall U.S. daily death count. Yet it remains far higher than it was in July. Also, most recently, daily deaths have actually begun rising again — largely driven by increasing transmission in various states in the Great Plains and the South.
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