WASHINGTON | COVID-19, which has officially killed 581,000 since the start of 2020 in the United States, has “no doubt” killed many more people in the country most bereaved in the world by the pandemic, the adviser said on Sunday. White House Medical Officer Anthony Fauci.
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Asked about a new study published this week by the University of Washington, which estimates the US death toll from the coronavirus at more than 900,000, Dr Fauci did not go so far as to validate this data.
Health officials “said from the start that an underestimation” of mortality “was very likely,” he said on NBC.
“This model evokes a significant toll” of 900,000 deaths, “it places the undervaluation at a level a little higher than I would have thought, but sometimes the models are correct, sometimes a little less”, has t -he adds.
“But I think there is no doubt that we have undervalued and we are still undervaluing” mortality, he admitted, citing a “historic” pandemic to justify the difficulty of a accurate count.
The United States, with more than 32 million cases and 581,000 officially recorded deaths, is the country with the heaviest toll in absolute terms.
Since January, however, cases and deaths have fallen in parallel with a rampant vaccination campaign. After a slight upturn linked in particular to the spring holidays, the decline has resumed since mid-April.
“We are at a turning point,” said the coordinator of the fight against COVID-19 at the White House, Jeffrey Zients, on the CNN channel.
He referred to vaccination figures, with 58% of adults having received at least one dose in the United States and more than 110 million people (one-third of the total population) fully vaccinated.
President Joe Biden has set a goal of having 70% of adults received at least one dose on the 4th of July national holiday, but the vaccination campaign is slowing as it comes to reaching the most skeptics or indifferent.
“We have the task to make access to vaccines even easier, to build people’s confidence,” explained Jeffrey Zients.
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