Nearly 200,000 dead from Covid-19 in the United States

Protesters marched for the deaths of Covid-19 on September 20, 2020 in New York (United States).

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Soon six weeks before the American presidential election, the official toll of the Covid-19 pandemic is expected to reach 200,000 deaths on Monday in the United States, where the coronavirus currently kills four times more proportionally than in Europe.

According to Johns Hopkins University, 199,525 inhabitants of the United States 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.

The pandemic at the heart of presidential debates

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.

“The primary responsibility of a president is to protect Americans.

But he won't.

It's absolutely disqualifying, ”Joe Biden said last Wednesday.

"If he had handled this as he handled the swine flu, 2 or 3 million people would have died", replied Donald Trump on Monday on Fox News, giving himself an "A +" for his own management [Joe Biden was vice president during the H1N1 flu pandemic in 2009].

Trump and the vaccine bet

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.

This is why betting on vaccines is not a short and medium term strategy, repeat the experts.

In the absence of widespread testing, better tracing of contact cases and real discipline in barrier gestures, hundreds of thousands of Americans could still die by the time the president returns to normalcy so much.

We need "a preventive screening approach to test asymptomatic people, as well as those who are most at risk because of their job or their environment," Thomas Tsai, an expert at Harvard, told AFP.

"We were not ready and we are not learning from our mistakes"

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

"We passed 200,000 in about July," said Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Institute, citing the observed excess mortality.

"We are the exception, we were not ready, we did not have enough tests and we do not learn from our mistakes", adds the doctor to explain why the virus kills today more than in Europe , despite the clear improvement in hospital treatment.

New outbreaks appear

First mistake, according to him: unlike Europe, the United States did not wait to have reduced the epidemic to a very low incidence before deconfining, in May and June, encouraged by a Donald Trump deaf to the warnings of its experts.

“We reopened everything and we pretend everything is fine,” he says.

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.

Fears heightened with the arrival of the flu

This error was built on an original fault: Donald Trump left the 50 state governors responsible for health mobilization, ranging from deconfinement decisions to the criteria for reopening schools.

"We've had this crazy patchwork of responses across the country that has created utter confusion," William Schaffner of Vanderbilt University told AFP.

"We should have and could have had a unified, coherent, strong and national response".

The health system will be particularly put to the test in the fall and winter, with the seasonal flu.

Fearing a double epidemic, authorities have ordered a record number of influenza vaccines.

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