Coronavirus deaths top 150,000 in US. ‘COVID-19 has changed our world’

Coronavirus has killed more than 150,000 people in the United States, Johns Hopkins University reports.

The U.S. reached the grim milestone on Wednesday, six months after the first COVID-19 case was reported in the country.

There have been 16.8 million confirmed cases of the COVID-19 virus worldwide, with more than 662,000 deaths, according to the university. John Hopkins’ data site is widely used to track coronavirus statistics around the world.

The United States leads the world in coronavirus deaths, followed by Brazil with more than 88,000 deaths and the United Kingdom with more than 46,000 deaths, Johns Hopkins University reported.

More than 32,000 people have died in New York of coronavirus, followed by more than 15,000 in New Jersey and more than 8,700 in California, the university says.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that the 2019-20 seasonal flu killed between 24,000 and 62,000 people nationally. A 2009 swine flu pandemic killed more than 12,000 people in the United States.

Coronavirus has killed more Americans than every war since the start of the Korean War combined, Time reports. It also has killed more Americans than World War I and every previous flu pandemic in the 20th century except the 1918 pandemic, which killed 675,000 in the U.S.

There have been more than 4.3 million confirmed cases in the U.S., Johns Hopkins University reported. Around 52.9 million people in the U.S. have been tested for the COVID-19 virus and 1.3 million people have recovered from the virus.

“COVID-19 has changed our world,” said Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the World Health Organization, BBC News reported. “It has brought people, communities and nations together, and driven them apart.”

But Tedros warned we have “a long, hard road ahead of us,” according to the network.

The coronavirus outbreak began in December in Wuhan, China, possibly after the virus passed to humans from bats and pangolins, an Asian scaly anteater, McClatchy News reported.

COVID-19, named because it’s a new type of coronavirus first seen in 2019, comes from a family of viruses responsible for the common cold, SARS, MERS and other ailments.

The World Health Organization has declared coronavirus a global pandemic. In the United States, President Donald Trump has declared a national emergency.

This story was originally published July 29, 2020 at 12:57 PM with the headline "Coronavirus deaths top 150,000 in US. ‘COVID-19 has changed our world’."