The United States on Tuesday passed 400,000 deaths from COVID-19, a stunning total that is only climbing as the crisis deepens.<\/p>\n
The country is now averaging more than 3,000 coronavirus deaths every day, according to\u00a0Johns Hopkins University data<\/a>, more than the number of people killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, and the daily death toll has been rising. The effects of a surge in gatherings and travel over the holidays are now coming into focus.<\/p>\n The grim milestone of 400,000 deaths came on the last full day in office for\u00a0President Trump, who has long rejected criticism of his handling of the pandemic.<\/p>\n And it\u2019s going to get worse<\/em>: President-elect Joe Biden\u2019s incoming CDC director,\u00a0Rochelle Walensky<\/a>, said Sunday on CBS’s \u201cFace the Nation\u201d that\u00a0she expects 500,000 COVID-19 deaths<\/a>\u00a0by the middle of February.<\/p>\n \u201cI think we still have some dark weeks ahead,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Flashback<\/em>:\u00a0At the end of March, as the crisis was beginning, Trump said that if deaths were limited to between 100,000 and 200,000 \u201cwe all, together, have done a very good job.\u201d The country has long ago exceeded those numbers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The United States on Tuesday passed...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30853","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health","category-u-s-a"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30853","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30853"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30853\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30854,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30853\/revisions\/30854"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}