The United States began the year 2021 Friday by crossing the threshold of twenty million confirmed cases of Covid-19 since the start of the epidemic on its soil, according to Johns Hopkins University reference numbers.
It also counted in the United States more than 346 thousand and 400 deaths due to the epidemic, which makes it the country with the most deaths and injuries, far ahead of India, which recorded 10.3 million injuries.
On Wednesday, the United States recorded a record daily death toll from Covid-19, amounting to 3,900 cases, according to a census of the Baltimore-based university.
Currently, more than 125,300 people with Covid-19 are receiving treatment in American hospitals, according to data from the "Covid Tracking Project" observatory.
It took several months for the country to reach the 10 million mark, but the pace of the outbreak accelerated dramatically in December.
On Sunday, the United States crossed the 19 million mark, a number equivalent to the entire population of New York State.
Since the fall, the United States has witnessed a significant acceleration in the spread of the epidemic, and the family celebrations of Thanksgiving in late November and Christmas and New Year in late December have exacerbated it, despite the authorities´ appeal to the population not to mix.
But Americans are counting on the largest vaccination campaign against Covid-19, which began on December 14 in the history of the United States.
On Friday, about three million people received the first dose of the vaccine, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
This number is still far from the target set by the administration of outgoing President Donald Trump, who announced that 20 million people will receive the vaccine by the end of the year. At the beginning of the week, President-elect Joe Biden denounced the delay in the vaccination campaign, but in an interview Thursday he expressed confidence in the improvement of the future prospects.
Biden, who will assume the presidency on January 20, said, "I am more optimistic than ever (...) We have the most effective teams in the world."
"There are vaccines available now that will work. We just have to find a way to speed up the process of distributing them," the president-elect added.
