The New York Times has a chart-laden interactive report this morning claiming that the true coronavirus toll in the US has already surpassed 200,000. That’s some 34,000 higher than the official death toll stands at the moment. Denise Lu writes:
As the pandemic has moved south and west from New York City, so have the unusual patterns in deaths from all causes. That suggests that the official death counts may be substantially underestimating the overall effects of the virus.
The piece analyses “excess deaths” – that is how many more deaths have been recorded than you would usually expect at this time. The data shows that most states have been seeing more deaths than they would normally expect to see most weeks since March.
Read it in full here: New York Times – The true coronavirus toll in the US has already surpassed 200,000
US reports highest number of deaths from coronavirus in a single day since mid-May
While the administration continues to press for schools to reopen, and some states continue to pursue a loosening of restrictions to help stimulate the economy, the US reported its highest number of deaths from coronavirus in a single day since mid-May.
The seven-day average of newly reported deaths has remained above 1,000 for 17 consecutive days now.
45 deaths in North Carolina equalled the state’s worst day of the pandemic so far, while Georgie recorded over 100 deaths for the second day in a row.
There is a slight caveat with this figure by the way – three days have recored a higher total number of deaths during that period since mid-May, but that was because they were days when states added a large number of backlogged deaths into the data.
Good morning, welcome to our live coverage of US politics and the coronavirus crisis for the day. Here’s a catch-up with where we are, and a bit of what we can expect to see later on today
- There were 53,758 new coronavirus cases recorded yesterday, a number that has risen for the second day in a row. And there were 1,468 deaths – the highest single day total since mid-May. For the last two weeks, the country has now averaged more than 1,000 deaths per day
- Joe Biden and Kamala Harris excoriated ‘failure’ Trump during their first joint appearance since he announced she would be his VP pick. They’ll be campaigning together again today
- Trump has already called Harris ‘nasty’ – is it because of her record of grilling powerful men?
- The OSCE office for democratic institutions recommends sending 500 monitors to observe the ‘most challenging’ US election in recent decades
- Facebook is set to roll out new tools which it claims will fight election disinformation
- Police declared a riot in Portland, on the 77th consecutive night of Black Lives Matter protests there
- Kayleigh McEnany gives a press briefing at 1pm. There’s nothing public in Trump’s diary, though that doesn’t rule out him doing another coronavirus briefing later on
I’m Martin Belam and I’ll be with you for the next couple of hours – you can get me at martin.belam@theguardian.com
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