The United States recorded 830 coronavirus deaths in the past 24 hours, bringing the total to 80,352, according to the real-time tally by Johns Hopkins University at 8:30pm Monday (0030 GMT Tuesday).
The figure followed Sunday’s toll of 776, the lowest daily tally since March, though major concerns remain over the number of deaths continuing to climb as some US states relax their lockdowns.
The country — hardest hit by the pandemic in terms of the number of fatalities — has now confirmed a total of 1,346,723 cases, the Baltimore-based school reported.
Meanwhile, a newly erected billboard in New York's Times Square has started showing the number of US coronavirus deaths that its creator says could have been avoided if President Donald Trump had acted sooner — and it's called the "Trump Death Clock."
Created by filmmaker Eugene Jarecki, the "clock" was installed on the roof of a Times Square building, empty due to the pandemic. As of Monday, the counter showed more than 48,000 deaths out of a total of more than 80,000, by far the highest tally in the world.
The "clock" ticks on the assumption that 60% of Covid-19 deaths in the United States could have been prevented had the Trump administration implemented mandatory social distancing and school closures just a week earlier than it did, on March 9 instead of March 16, Jarecki explained in a post on Medium.
The New York-based filmmaker, who has twice won awards at the Sundance Film Festival, explained that 60% was a conservative estimate calculated by specialists following remarks made in mid-April by leading US infectious diseases expert Anthony Fauci.
Fauci, who has become the trusted face of the government's virus response, had said that if "you had started mitigation earlier, you could have saved lives."
"The lives already unnecessarily lost demand we seek more responsible crisis leadership," Jarecki wrote in his Medium post.
"Just as the names of fallen soldiers are etched on memorials to remind us of the cost of war, quantifying the lives lost to the president's delayed coronavirus response would serve a vital public function."
