Over 500,000 people have now died from COVID-19, Johns Hopkins University reported on Sunday, and the world’s death toll has doubled in less than two months.
On the same day that the number of cases surpassed 10 million, the world hit this new tragic milestone. While the coronavirus pandemic caused the most damage in China and Europe at the beginning of the year, it’s nations like the United States, Brazil, and India that have driven the recent exponential growth of the virus. The coronavirus death toll only surpassed 250,000 on May 4, or barely seven weeks ago.
In the United States, deaths have decreased significantly in the past several weeks, while case numbers are still growing, which can be explained by a variety of possibilities including a greater proportion of young people getting infected and increased testing capacity. Still, particularly if many Americans remain resistant to wearing face masks, the projected death toll remains dire. Already 125,000 people have died from the virus in the U.S., with the University of Washington estimating 179,106 deaths by Oct. 1 in the absence of a universal mask-wearing order.
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