Nearly six weeks before the American presidential election, the official toll of the Covid-19 pandemic was close to 200,000 dead on Monday, September 21 in the United States.

According to Johns-Hopkins University, 199,743 inhabitants have died of the coronavirus out of 6.8 million recorded cases, ahead of the European Union (144,000 dead), Brazil and India.

The United States still records nearly a thousand deaths every day, which, compared to the population, is four times the European death rate, according to Our World in Data.

This thousand daily deaths, where black and Hispanic people are over-represented (more than half of the deaths under the age of 65), is for the Democratic candidate Joe Biden the symbol of President Donald Trump's incompetence in the face of the greatest test of his tenure.

"Because of Donald Trump's lies and incompetence over the past six months, we have witnessed one of the heaviest loss of American lives in history," the former vice president attacked on Monday .

"He was not at the level (for this crisis). He froze, he did not act. He panicked," he said.

Trump gives himself an "A +" rating

"If he had handled this as he handled the swine flu, two or three million people would have died," Donald Trump said earlier today, giving himself an "A +" rating for his own management ( Joe Biden was vice president during the H1N1 flu pandemic in 2009).

The leader is waiting for a vaccine to turn the page on the health crisis.

He hopes for October, just before the election, and logistical preparations are underway to distribute the doses of the vaccines as soon as ongoing clinical trials produce conclusive results.

Only one American manufacturer, Pfizer, believes October is possible, but that won't affect most Americans until April 2021, according to Donald Trump, or even mid-2021, according to senior officials.

"The Covid will be the third cause of death this year in the United States," lamented Tom Frieden, who headed the Centers for Disease Control under Barack Obama.

Daily life certainly remains disrupted.

In many cities, schools have returned to school virtually, restaurants and bars remain closed indoors, and the wearing of masks has become widespread.

But outbreaks continue to erupt in a large part of the territory, especially in the Midwest, for example on university campuses.

Alert level raised by London

For its part, the United Kingdom raised the alert level on Monday measuring the evolution of the epidemic of the new coronavirus and decided to close pubs and restaurants earlier, in the face of the threat of a second wave that could make more than 200 deaths per day without "changing course".

In a statement to Parliament scheduled for Tuesday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson "will confirm that pubs, bars and restaurants will have to close at 10 pm from Thursday" in England, Downing Street said in a statement. 

The number of people rubbing shoulders in these establishments should also decrease since "only table service" will now be authorized, Boris Johnson must announce after a crisis meeting of the British government in the morning.  

The restrictions come as the heads of medical services in the four British provinces on Monday raised the alert level linked to the virus to 4, from 3 since June, which corresponds to a level of transmission "high or increasing exponentially".

Exponential contamination

The most bereaved country in Europe with nearly 42,000 dead, the United Kingdom is currently seeing contaminations "double every seven days", warned the government's scientific adviser Patrick Vallance on Monday in a televised address.

If the epidemic followed this curve, "we would arrive at 50,000 cases per day in mid-October" - against around 6,000 currently according to estimates - and this could lead to "200 deaths per day or more in mid-November", a- he continued.

At the height of the pandemic, the United Kingdom counted nearly 1,000 deaths per day.

"If we do not change course, the virus will take off. This is the path we are on," added Professor Chris Whitty, Chief Medical Officer for England, in this speech.

With AFP

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