US death toll starts to rise again, reversing three-month fall

The coronavirus death toll in the United States is now climbing again as the recent surge in cases in the sunbelt states feeds through into fatalities.

At least 867 people died of Covid-19 on Thursday in the US and, nationally, the crucial seven-day average has begun to climb after falling steadily since mid-April when deaths first peaked at over 2,000 a day.

For several weeks President Donald Trump has been blaming the country’s surging case numbers on the availability of more tests and has suggested that test capacity should be cut to reverse the trend.

However, intensive care wards have been filling up across the sunbelt states from Florida to California and now – as predicted by experts – deaths have started to climb again.

The trend bodes ill not just for those caught up in the outbreak, the bulk of whom are from impoverished and BAME communities, but for the President himself who is hoping to be elected for a second term in November.

In terms of recorded cases, the United States has become the worst-affected country, with more than 3.1 million diagnosed Covid 19 cases and at least 133,291 deaths since the crisis began in January.

The US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) predicts the nation’s coronavirus death toll will rise to between 140,000 to 160,000 deaths by August.

The trend will likely continue unless social distancing can be effectively reinstituted across the south and mid-west of the country.

“As predicted, a month from the case surge started, we are moving to a higher death rate in the US”, Dr Eric Topol, a Professor of Molecular Medicine at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, tweeted.

“I think the shift to younger patients and better treatments will lead to a flatter slope compared with April. But thwarting the surge could have prevented this altogether.”

There has been a significant delay between case numbers mounting again in the US and deaths starting to climb again.

This has allowed President Trump and other sceptics to argue that the statistical change had more to do with testing than the real progress of the virus.

However, it is more likely the delay is explained by larger numbers of young people testing positive as tests become more widely available. This is likely to have given the appearance of a delay as younger cohorts are less vulnerable.

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