Activists have planted thousands of American flags in Washington in tribute to the 200,000 people killed by the coronavirus.

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J. Scott Applewhite / AP / SIPA

It is the highest record in the world.

Six weeks before the presidential election, the United States recorded its 200,000th death attributed to Covid-19 on Tuesday, according to John Hopkins University, the coronavirus continuing to kill hundreds of Americans every day.

The benchmark count from the Baltimore-based university showed 200,182 deaths on Tuesday noon, out of nearly 6.9 million cases in the country, the hardest hit in the world.

"Covid will be the third leading cause of death this year in the United States, more than accidents, strokes and Alzheimer's," tweeted Tom Frieden, former director of the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC).

In 2019, cardiovascular disease and cancer had each claimed 600,000 lives.

https://twitter.com/DrTomFrieden/status/1308166624139259910

"It hardly affects anyone," says Trump

It is a “historic national tragedy,” lamented the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Democrat Nancy Pelosi, accusing Donald Trump of negligence.

"It hardly affects anyone," for his part said the American president on Monday evening in an electoral rally for the November 3 ballot.

"It affects the elderly, those with heart problems and others," he said, without a word of compassion for these deaths.

Over the past seven days, around 5,300 people have died from the virus in the United States, compared to some 2,000 in the European Union, according to data compiled by AFP from official sources.

Reported to the population, the coronavirus kills four times more each day in America than in Europe.

At least 6,000 patients are hospitalized in an intensive care unit, and 1,500 on artificial ventilators, according to the Covid Tracking Project.

"We will distribute a vaccine, we will defeat the virus, we will end the pandemic and we will enter an unprecedented new era of prosperity, cooperation and peace," Donald Trump said Tuesday in a message for the General Assembly of the 'UN.

The number of doses of a possible vaccine will however be very limited in the first months.

By the second quarter of 2021, when in theory enough doses will have been manufactured to immunize 330 million Americans, everything indicates that at this rate, several tens or hundreds of thousands of Americans could still die.

"Incompetence"

"America has paid a heavier price than any other country in the world," Joe Biden, his Democratic opponent for the White House, said on Monday, again deploring his "lies" and "incompetence".

Donald Trump publicly played down the severity of the pandemic from the get-go, hiding from Americans in February that he knew the virus was airborne and more dangerous than the flu, according to interviews at the time with reporter Bob Woodward.

Latest episode of cacophony: The CDC wrote on its site on Friday that the coronavirus was mainly transmitted by "respiratory droplets or small particles, such as those in aerosols, produced when an infected person coughs, sneezes, sings, speaks or breathe ”.

The hypothesis of transmission by microdroplets remaining airborne for minutes or hours, supported by a growing number of studies, was not heretofore recognized as primary by experts at CDC or the World Health Organization.

But on Monday, the CDC withdrew the text, arguing that it had been posted "by mistake".

World

Coronavirus: In a recording, Trump admits to wanting to "minimize" the severity of Covid-19

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