Samara Heisz/iStock(NEW YORK) — While many countries around the world and cities in the U.S. are pointing toward positive signs that social distancing might be finally flattening the curve, the novel coronavirus death toll continues to be staggering with at least 113,000 dead worldwide.
The U.S. is the global leader in the number of cases and deaths. More than 21,733 people in the U.S. have died as a result of COVID-19, the disease caused by the new respiratory virus, according to data compiled by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. At least 550,000 people in the U.S. have tested positive and over 2.6 million Americans have been tested for the disease.
Worldwide, more than 1.8 million people have been diagnosed since the virus emerged in China in December. The actual numbers are believed to be much higher due to testing shortages, many unreported cases and suspicions that some governments are hiding the scope of their nations’ outbreaks.
Here’s how the situation is developing Monday. All times Eastern:
4:55 a.m.: Moscow introduces digital passes to move around the city
The Moscow government introduced a special page on their website to apply for a QR code to move around the city. This morning the website became unavailable for some users, Meduza reported. Officials said the website was down due to a botnet attack, that was coming “also from abroad.” The pass will be obligatory starting from Wednesday.
3:48 a.m.: President Trump retweets call to fire Dr. Anthony Fauci
President Donald Trump retweeted a tweet demanding that Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, be fired from his post.
The tweet was in response to DeAnna Lorraine who is currently running for Congress in California.
Said Lorraine: “Fauci is now saying that had Trump listened to the medical experts earlier he could’ve saved more lives. Fauci was telling people on February 29th that there was nothing to worry about and it posed no threat to the US public at large.Time to #FireFauci.”
Sorry Fake News, it’s all on tape. I banned China long before people spoke up. Thank you @OANN https://t.co/d40JQkUZg5
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 12, 2020
Only hours earlier Fauci had appeared on CNN saying that he thinks more lives could have been saved if mitigation efforts to stop the spread of the novel coronavirus had started earlier.
“I mean, obviously, you could logically say that if you had a process that was ongoing and you started mitigation earlier, you could have saved lives,” Fauci told CNN’s Jake Tapper on State of the Union. “Obviously, no one is going to deny that. But what goes into those decisions is complicated … But you’re right, I mean, obviously, if we had right from the very beginning shut everything down, it may have been a little bit different. But there was a lot of pushback about shutting things down back then.”
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