The US suffered another sad day on Wednesday amid the chaos at the Capitol, with the country’s daily coronavirus death toll the highest recorded in any country over the course of the pandemic.
The daily toll of 3,865 for 6 January marked the fifth day in three weeks that saw more than 3,500 Americans die from coronavirus-related complications. More than 30,000 people have died since Christmas eve, Johns Hopkins data shows.
The US toll passed 350,000 on Sunday, prompting leading infectious diseases expert – and a sidelined member of the White House’s pandemic response task force – Dr Anthony Fauci to issue an implicit rebuke to Donald Trump, who claimed in tweets on that morning that case numbers were being exaggerated and deaths wrongly attributed.
“Go into the trenches,” Fauci told NBC’s Meet the Press. “Go into the hospitals, go into the intensive care units and see what is happening. Those are real numbers, real people and real deaths.”
US health officials warned on Wednesday that Arizona has become the Covid “hot spot of the world”, five months after Trump held up the US state’s pandemic response as exemplary.
“It’s way worse than July already, and it’s going to continue to get worse. We’re probably two weeks behind LA in terms of our situation,” Will Humble, the head of the Arizona Public Health Association, said, referring to Los Angeles County, where a coronavirus surge has created a shortage of oxygen. The situation has led ambulance crews to stop transporting patients they can’t revive in the field, with one out of every 119 people in the state testing positive in the past week.
Arizona, which now has the worst coronavirus diagnosis rate in the country, has seen a triple-digit number of new virus-related deaths for the second day in a row and more than 7,200 daily cases, according to health officials.
As hospitals increasingly face being overwhelmed, pressure is mounting for the introduction of more forceful control measures such as mandatory statewide masks.
With more than 21 million cases and 361,123 deaths, the US accounts for one in four infections and one in five fatalities worldwide. The global coronavirus case total is 87m, with 1.9m people dying in just over a year since the start of the pandemic.
