Over the last seven days, a grim new COVID-19 calculus has emerged: one person died every 80 seconds from the coronavirus in America.
And the pace at which those 7,486 people died appears to be accelerating, a new NBC New tally revealed Wednesday.
In July, a total of 26,198 death were reported, meaning one every 102 seconds. As of Wednesday morning, more than 158,000 people in the U.S. had died of the virus since the start of the pandemic.
The numbing new national snapshot of how COVID-19 is claiming more and more lives came as Johns Hopkins University reported another awful milestone: The world death toll from this plague had eclipsed 700,000.
The U.S. has experienced nearly 4.8 million confirmed cases.
Under fire for being slow to respond to the COVID-19 crisis and presiding over the biggest economic disaster since the Great Depression, President Donald Trump once again downplayed the extent of the pandemic in a call-in interview Wednesday with “Fox & Friends.”
“This thing is going away,” he said. “It will go away like things go away.”
Joe Biden, the Democrat hoping to oust Trump from the White House come November, fired back.
“Donald Trump continues to live in a world of delusion,” Biden said in a statement.
In other developments:
- Citing the dangers of the coronavirus pandemic, Biden announced he would not be traveling to Milwaukee later this month for the Democratic National Convention. Instead, Biden said he would virtually accept his party’s nomination to run for president. His announcement comes a little over two weeks after Trump, under pressure from fellow Republicans, reluctantly pulled the plug on plans to hold an in-person GOP convention in Jacksonville, Florida.
- The Chicago Public School system became the latest to ditch plans to reopen classrooms to in-person education come September. Instead, the nation’s third-largest school system will do what many other school districts are doing and reopen remotely on Sept. 8 and revisit that strategy on Nov. 9. “As a district, we value parent feedback, and we cannot overlook that a large percentage of parents have indicated they do not feel comfortable sending their students to school under a hybrid model for the start of the school year,” Janice K. Jackson, CEO of Chicago Public Schools, said in a statement. Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot said the decision was “rooted in public health data.”
- Police announced the arrest of a New Jersey woman who was caught on videotape knocking an ailing woman — who had just told her to wear her face mask properly – to the ground. Terri Thomas, 25, was charged with second-degree aggravated assault and given an Aug. 24 court date. Margot Kagan, who is 54 and still recuperating from a liver transplant, told cops she was by a fax machine at a Staples store in Hackensack when she called out her alleged attacker and raised her cane to defend herself. Thomas, police said, tossed Kagan to the ground, breaking one of her legs in the process.
