Covid-19: US surpasses 700,000 deaths from virus

Washington - Toll roughly equivalent to population of the nation’s capital Washington

US fatalities from Covid-19 surpassed 700,000 on Friday, according to figures from Johns Hopkins University, a toll roughly equivalent to the population of the nation’s capital Washington.

The grim threshold comes with an average of well over 1,000 dying each day, in a country where 55.7 per cent of the population is now fully vaccinated, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

After a heavily criticized early response to the pandemic, the United States has since organized among the world’s most effective vaccine roll-outs.

But it nonetheless finds itself having notched the most fatalities in the world, far exceeding other frontrunners such as Brazil and India, and facing a resurgence in cases due to the prominence of the highly contagious Delta variant.

While the latest global coronavirus wave peaked in late August, the virus continues to spread rapidly, particularly in the United States.

The vaccination campaign launched by US authorities in December — which had reached a peak in April, with sometimes more than four million injections per day — has meanwhile slowed considerably.

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