Coronavirus deaths in US top 900,000

WASHINGTON－People in the United States were confronted with a fresh reminder of the devastation brought by the pandemic when the country on Friday logged more than 900,000 deaths from COVID-19.

The Johns Hopkins University coronavirus tracker showed the rapid rise from 800,000 deaths in mid-December.

New infections linked to the Omicron variant are falling, but daily deaths are rising, with an average of 2,400, government figures show.

Across the border in Canada, the trend on Omicron's spread is also encouraging. The wave of infections caused by the variant is cresting, experts said. But that meant little to the thousands of people who demonstrated in major cities, including the financial hub Toronto, on Saturday as noisy protests against vaccine mandates spread from Ottawa, the capital.

In the US, where protests against vaccination policies from government have also been common, hospitalizations from COVID-19 remain high.

Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the elevated level of infections is "stretching our healthcare capacity and workforce to its limits in some areas of the country".

COVID-19 deaths usually occur a few weeks after patients get the virus, which explains why the spike in deaths occurs later than the spike in new cases.

"Today, our nation marks another tragic milestone－900,000 American lives have been lost to COVID-19," US President Joe Biden said in a statement. "We pray for the loved ones they have left behind, and together we keep every family enduring this pain in our hearts."

People in the US are dying from COVID-19 in large numbers because only 64 percent of the population are fully immunized, despite highly effective vaccines being widely available.

The US has the most COVID-19 deaths in absolute terms, ahead of Brazil and India, according to government figures.

Mandates spur protests

In Canada, which has fared much better than its neighbor, the protests began as a movement against a Canadian vaccine requirement for cross-border truckers, but have turned into a rallying point against public health measures.

"We're all sick and tired of the mandates, of the intimidation, of living in one big prison," said Robert, a Toronto protester who did not give his last name. "We just want to go back to normal."

The pandemic has killed at least 5.7 million people worldwide since it began in December 2019, according to an Agence France-Presse tally published on Friday.

But the World Health Organization says the actual toll could be two to three times higher.

Aside from Canada, anger over vaccine mandates has also been on show in Europe. In Austria, a vaccine mandate adopted on Jan 20 by the country's parliament, came into force on Saturday.

Austrians over the age of 18 must be vaccinated against COVID-19 from Saturday or face the possibility of a heavy fine, an unprecedented measure in the European Union.

Parliament's adoption was the culmination of a process that began in November in the face of the rapid spread of the Omicron variant.

In neighboring Germany, a similar proposal championed by the new Social Democrat Chancellor Olaf Scholz was debated last month in the lower house of parliament but many MPs still oppose the idea.

Agencies - Xinhua