Coronavirus deaths top 50,000 in US, and ‘worst is yet ahead,’ WHO chief says

Don Sweeney, Mark Price
·2 min read

The coronavirus has killed more than 50,000 people in the United States as of Friday, April 24, just four days after passing 40,000 U.S. deaths on Sunday, Johns Hopkins University reports.

The latest total is nearly 54,000 as of late Saturday, data shows.

There have been 2.9 million confirmed cases of the COVID-19 virus worldwide, with nearly 203,000 deaths, according to the university. More than 26,000 people have died in Italy, and more than 22,000 in Spain.

The United States has had more than 939,000 confirmed cases as of Saturday, and around 5.1 million people in the U.S. have been tested for the COVID-19 virus, Johns Hopkins University reported.

Most of the U.S. deaths have occurred in New York City: 17,126, the university says.

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

“Trust us. The worst is yet ahead of us,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, NBC News reported.

“Let’s prevent this tragedy,” Tedros said, according to the network. “It’s a virus that many people still don’t understand.”

A potential second wave of infections in the United States next winter could be even worse, says CDC chief Robert Redfield, The Washington Post reported.

“There’s a possibility that the assault of the virus on our nation next winter will actually be even more difficult than the one we just went through,” Redfield said, according to the publication.

“And when I’ve said this to others, they kind of put their head back, they don’t understand what I mean,” he said, The Washington Post reported. “We’re going to have the flu epidemic and the coronavirus epidemic at the same time.”

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.