U.S Becomes World's Epicentre Of Epidemic

As the world continues to battle the rampaging Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, the United States now has now overtaken Italy as the country with the highest death toll in the world.

According to a data released by Johns Hopkins University, New York Times and Reuters news agency, the country had no fewer than 20,506 COVID-19-related deaths.

With this, Italy, which used to be top, has gone down the pecking order, one step behind the United States with no fewer than 19,468 deaths as of April 11.

On April 10, however, the U.S. also became the first country in the world to record no fewer than 2,000 deaths in a single day.

According to the New York Times database, as of April 11, there were no fewer than 528,301 confirmed cases of the deadly virus across the country.

Meanwhile, New York remains the epicentre of the disease in the U.S with no fewer than 180,458 cases which represents 34 per cent of the total, and 8,627 deaths representing 42 per cent of the country-wide fatalities.

New Jersey, Michigan, Massachusetts, California, Pennsylvania and Louisiana follow with no fewer than 20,000 cases each, and 2,183, 1,391, 686, 629, 506 and 806 deaths respectively.

Also, public health experts are warning that the U.S. death toll could reach 200,000 over the summer if stay-at-home orders are lifted after 30 days.

President Donald Trump, in the meantime, has always argued that his country is reporting the highest figures because it is conducting more tests than any other in the world.

Data compiled by Worldometer, shows that the U.S. had conducted over 2.6 million tests as of Saturday evening.

This is twice higher than tests carried out by Germany and Russia, the closest countries with no fewer than 1.3 million and 1.1 million respectively.