Coronavirus: With over 20,000 deaths, US overtakes Italy as worst-hit country

The US has overtaken Italy as the country with the highest COVID-19 death toll in the world.

Tallies by Johns Hopkins University, New York Times and Reuters news agency, all show that the country had at least 20,506 COVID-19 deaths as of Saturday.

With this, Italy, which had 19,468 deaths as of Saturday afternoon, is now behind US.

On Friday, the US became the first county in the world to record at least 2,000 deaths in a single day.

As of Saturday evening, there were 528,301 confirmed cases of the deadly virus across the country, according to the New York Times database.

New York remains the US epicentre with 180,458 cases which represents 34 percent of the total, and 8,627 deaths representing 42 percent of the country-wide fatalities.

New Jersey, Michigan, Massachusetts, California, Pennsylvania and Louisiana follow with 20,000 cases each, and 2,183, 1,391, 686, 629, 506 and 806 deaths respectively.

Public health experts are warning that the US death toll could reach 200,000 over the summer if stay-at-home orders are lifted after 30 days.

President Donald Trump has always argued that his country is reporting the highest figures because it is conducting more tests than any other in the world.

Data compiled by Worldometer, a reference website that provides real-time statistics for diverse topics, show that the US had conducted over 2.6 million tests as of Saturday evening.

This is twice higher than tests carried out by Germany and Russia, the closest countries with 1.3 million and 1.1 million respectively.

The website has no data on the number of tests conducted by China where the virus broke out in December.

China’s COVID-19 cases and deaths stood at 8,052 and 3,339 as of Saturday, figures dismissed by US politicians and activists.