COVID deaths nearing 2 million globally; reports of US variant of virus false

Global deaths from COVID-19 are nearing 2 million, the Johns Hopkins University in the United States reports.

The current death toll stands at 1,918,227 from more than 89 million confirmed cases of the disease. 

The US continues to record the highest death toll, with fatalities racing towards 370,000 people. The Johns Hopkins tracker shows that 369,278 people have so far died in the US and Brazil, with 201,460 deaths, has the second highest number of fatalities from the disease. 

The US reached a new daily total deaths of more than 4,000 in a day, while infection totals also reached new counts of more than 300,000 people in a single day, the New York Times and The Associated Press report. This makes it the second consecutive day that the US has broken its daily case count.

In response to the increased surge of the disease, US President-elect Joe Biden has said that he will be releasing all vaccine doses to states.  

Reports of US variant false

Meanwhile, The New York Times has reported as false, claims by White House coronavirus response coordinator, Dr Deborah Birx, that there is a US variant of the COVID-19 virus. 

The New York Times says the report originated at a recent meeting where Birx presented graphs of the increasing cases across the country. She suggested to other members of the task force that a new, more transmissible variant originating in the US, might explain the surge, as another variant did in Britain.

CDC officials had disagreed with her assessment, but were not able to have her statement removed. 

In the meantime, Pfizer and BioNTech have said that their vaccine is effective against the more infectious variants of the virus from the United Kingdom and South Africa. The results of their study was posted on the bioRxiv site on Thursday.

Calls for states of emergency in Japan

In other parts of the world, several regional governments in Japan have asked for a state of emergency to be declared, similar to Tokyo, in order to stem the surging rise in COVID-19 cases.

The heads of Osaka, Kyoto and Hyogo prefectures in central Japan made the request to Yasutoshi Nishimura, the minister in charge of coronavirus measures, in an online conference call yesterday, Osaka Governor Hirofumi Yoshimura told reporters. 

There was no immediate decision, but the government panel of medical experts will study the situation, Yoshimura said.    

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