America Passes Italy And China In Most Confirmed Coronavirus Cases
The United States currently has more confirmed cases of coronavirus than any other country, with more than 85,500 positive tests.
According to the latest figures compiled by Johns Hopkins University, the United States has overtaken both China’s 81,782 cases and Italy’s 80,589 cases. However, with almost 1,300 coronavirus related fatalities, US death toll IS behind China’s 3,291 and Italy’s 8,215.
This devastating milestone came as President Donald Trump called for the nation to get back to work “pretty quickly.”
President Trump stated that it was “a tribute to the amount of testing that we’re doing.”
VP Mike Pence said covid-19 tests were available now in all 50 states, and over 552,000 tests had already been conducted nationwide.
President Trump has been criticized for setting the goal of Easter Sunday, 12 April, for reopening the country. A record-breaking 3.3 million people have filed for unemployment claims in the United States just last week as the pandemic has shut down massive parts of the American economy, and the impact of the crisis has begun to emerge.
Economic experts are predicting a “catastrophic unemployment crisis.” The labor department announced that jobless claims filed by people seeking unemployment assistance rose to 3.28 million by almost 281,000 the last week. This is the highest ever reported figure, beating the previous record of 695,000 claims filed in the final week of October 1982.
Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin predicted unemployment in the US could reach 20%. The Trump white house is pushing through a $2 trillion stimulus package that includes direct payments to taxpayers along with bailouts for affected industries to mitigate Covid-19’s impact.
“This morning’s jobless claims confirm that the United States is in the thralls of a catastrophic unemployment crisis, the likes of which we haven’t seen since the Great Depression,” stated Andrew Stettner, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a Washington think-tank. “This represents the single worst one-day piece of labor market news in America’s history.”
