US passes 25m COVID cases, over a quarter of world’s infections

The United States has surpassed 25 million coronavirus cases, according to data from Johns Hopkins University, an American research institution.

The most recent data from Johns Hopkins’s on Sunday indicates that 25,031,463 cases have been confirmed.

The same data shows the U.S. has reported 417,902 deaths due to the pandemic, the most of any country in the world.

President Joe Biden signed several executive orders in his first week in office targeting the coronavirus, including requiring masks to be worn in airports and on all federal buildings. His administration has also proposed administering 100 million doses of the vaccine in his first 100 days in office.

The administration also plans to use the Federal Emergency Management Agency to set up a goal of 100 federal vaccination sites in its first month.

Health experts and government officials have recently warned that the more infectious U.K. strain of the coronavirus could soon become the dominant virus in the U.S. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson stated last week that the new strain could be significantly more deadly.

Biden’s nominee for Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra said on Sunday that the U.S. was currently in a “nosedive” when it came to the uncontrolled spread of the coronavirus.

“We have to pull it up. Failure is not an option,” Becerra told CNN Sunday.
According to data from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), more than 20 million doses of the coronavirus vaccines have been administered thus far and around 3 million people have received their second dose of the vaccines.

Countries around the world are in a race against time to get their populations inoculated before the coronavirus mutates into a strain that could resist newly approved vaccinations.
Vivek Murthy, Biden’s nominee for surgeon-general,

told ABC News on Sunday that 100 million doses in 100 days was “a floor, not a ceiling” and cautioned about new strains.

“The variants are very concerning,” Murthy told the network. “It’s up to us to adapt and stay ahead.”

The U.S. caseload remains by far the highest in absolute terms.

India, where the population is about four times larger than in the U.S., has the second-highest caseload with about 10.6 million cases, according to Johns Hopkins.