More than 1,000 people have died of the novel coronavirus pandemic in the United States.
According to the latest reading of the Johns Hopkins University tracker, U.S. deaths caused from COVID-19 eclipsed over 1,000 people on Thursday, with over a quarter of those deaths occurring in New York. The new data also places the U.S. as the third-most infected country behind China and Italy.
Over 480,000 people have tested positive for the coronavirus globally. Of those, at least 21,500 have died from it, and more than 115,800 have recovered. The U.S. has seen at least 69,000 confirmed cases with 619 reported recoveries.
The milestone in American deaths comes just days after confirmed COVID-19 cases in the country exceeded 50,000. Surgeon General Jerome Adams predicted on Monday that the public health emergency was about to “get bad.”
The White House Coronavirus Task Force also gave messages of caution this week. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, suggested on Wednesday that COVID-19 could potentially become cyclical with weather patterns.
“The reason I say that is that what we’re starting to see now, in the Southern Hemisphere … is that we’re having cases that are appearing at they go into their winter season. And if, in fact, they have a substantial outbreak, it will be inevitable that we need to be prepared that we’ll get a cycle around the second time,” he said.
Fauci added that the phenomenon necessitates the development of a vaccine in the near future to mitigate future cases of COVID-19.
“I know we’ll be successful in putting this down now. But we really need to be prepared for another cycle. And what we’re doing, I believe, will prepare us well,” he concluded.
Deborah Birx, the response coordinator for the task force, echoed Fauci’s assessment, saying the steps the Trump administration is taking to deter the spread of the virus are “dealing with Cycle A right now.”
Fauci and other health experts had previously estimated that a vaccine for the novel coronavirus could potentially take up to a year to develop and distribute to the public, which enables the virus to continue its rapidly increasing infection rate for the next several months.
“It will take at least a year to a year-and-a-half to have a vaccine we can use,” Fauci said in early March.
