US surpasses 5 million cases of coronavirus

WASHINGTON－COVID-19 cases in the United States passed a grim new milestone of 5 million on Sunday with new infections soaring, further casting doubt on Washington's response to the ravaging pandemic.

The country has been hammered by the pandemic, recording nearly 163,000 deaths－by far the highest of any country. Brazil on Saturday became the second country to pass 100,000 deaths.

The global death toll is at least 727,288, according to a running tally from the Johns Hopkins University.

In response to the US' death toll, its politicized resistance to masks and its rising caseload, European nations have barred US tourists and visitors from other countries with growing cases from freely traveling to the bloc.

Nearly 20 million cases have been registered worldwide－probably reflecting only a fraction of the actual number of infections, according to health experts.

COVID-19 has now become the leading cause of death in the US, killing more people per day than cancer or heart disease, according to a graph published in Newsweek on April 9. The disaster has killed more US citizens than the combined US casualties from the country's wars in the Korean Peninsula, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq.

In order to downplay the scope and danger of the pandemic, US President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that the US has one of the lowest COVID-19 mortality rates in the world.

However, the reality is that the US has a mortality rate per 100,000 higher than those of many other countries, including Canada, Germany, France and the Netherlands, according to a recent article published by The Hill.

"But Trump is not focused on those numbers" and he has been fixated on a figure called the case fatality rate (the percentage of people who die after contracting COVID-19) in order to confuse people and cover up the extremely high rate of deaths as a proportion of the population, according to the article.

Meanwhile, as cases surge across the country, Republicans and Democrats increasingly view the disease in starkly different ways, according to a report published on June 25 by the Pew Research Center.

Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents are about twice as likely as Republicans and Republican leaners to say that masks should be worn always. But Republicans are much more likely than Democrats to say that masks should rarely or never be worn, according to the report.

The wide split between different political factions has not only prevented US citizens from acting in accordance with the preventive guidelines, but also hindered the country from forming a comprehensive anti-pandemic plan.

Expertise denigrated

Witnessing the government's inability and bigotry in tackling the coronavirus crisis, more than 1,200 US scientists have signed an open letter, accusing the Trump administration of denigrating "scientific expertise".

They also warned that "the dismissal of scientific evidence in policy formulation has affected wide areas of the social, biological, environmental and physical sciences".

Separately, Francis Fukuyama, a famed political scientist, wrote in a recent article titled "The Wages of American Political Decay": "In a perfect world, this unprecedented pandemic would have been an occasion for Americans to put aside their differences and rally around the flag...But overall, the pandemic has served to deepen polarization, and that is likely to get worse as time goes on."

Elsewhere, India's COVID-19 case tally rose to 2,215,074 and the number of deaths surged to 44,386, data issued by the federal health ministry said on Monday.

Monday marked the 11th consecutive day that a single-day spike of more than 50,000 fresh cases was recorded in India, and the fourth straight day that over 60,000 fresh cases were recorded in a single day.

Xinhua - Agencies