United States - Coronavirus

Cases: 28,826,307 Deaths: 512,590

The US has topped over 500,000 deaths in the Covid-19 pandemic. It will be the latest grim milestone for a country that has by far the highest death toll in the world from the virus.

If you held a minute's silence consecutively for every person who has died from Covid in the US, it would take 347 days, almost a full year, to honour them all.

At the start of the pandemic, it was largely concentrated in a few large cities with diverse communities of colour, like New York and Detroit.

But towards the end of last year, some of the least populated US states - including North and South Dakota - saw some of the worst outbreaks, not just in America, but in the world.

– Covid-19 will go away ‘like a miracle’

Since the start of the outbreak, Mr Trump has repeatedly said that the virus will go away. In February, he said: “It’s going to disappear one day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.” He also said in the same month: “A lot of people think that goes away in April, with the heat, as the heat comes in, typically that will go away in April.”

– Covid-19 affects ‘virtually nobody’

During a campaign rally in the swing state of Ohio on September 21, Mr Trump played down the scale of the virus. He told supporters: “Now we know it. It affects elderly people. Elderly people with heart problems and other problems. But they have other problems, that’s what it really affects, that’s it.” He added: “But it affects virtually nobody. It’s an amazing thing.”

–He suggested checking if disinfectant could be injected into humans

In late April, Mr Trump suggested checking whether disinfectant could be injected into humans to combat Covid-19 or if light could be used. He said: “I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute, and is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that.”

– Not wanting to wear a mask

In April, Mr Trump announced guidance recommending that Americans wear face coverings in public to help fight the spread of the virus. However, he followed up the announcement by saying: “I’m choosing not to do it. It’s a recommendation, they recommend it,” Mr Trump said. “I just don’t want to wear one myself.”

– Covid-19 is like flu and should be treated as such

Mr Trump has repeatedly compared Covid-19 to the seasonal flu.

In February, he said: “This is a flu. This is like a flu. “It’s a little like a regular flu that we have flu shots for, and we’ll essentially have a flu shot for this in a fairly quick manner.”

As America mourned 500,000 coronavirus deaths, the country’s top virologist Dr Anthony Fauci said political divisiveness in the country and the Trump administration’s “mixed signals” on health guidelines were detrimental to efforts to curb the pandemic.

“There’s red states and blue states that are almost hostile to each other in some respects because of political differences … I think that’s the worst possible ingredient to be able to address an outbreak of an infection that even under the best of circumstances would be a formidable challenge,” Dr Fauci said on Monday.

“And then the mixed signals that we were getting from the White House. I mean, you can’t deny that when you have the medical people saying please adhere to these guidelines and then you have the president saying liberate Virginia, liberate Michigan. That’s not helpful,” he said.

Dr Fauci, who was in the White House coronavirus task force during the Trump administration and is now a top adviser to Joe Biden as well, said the pandemic arrived in the US as the country was riddled with political divisions in which wearing a mask became a political statement rather than a public health measure.

During the previous administration, Dr Fauci and Mr Trump were often found publicly disagreeing with each other on Covid-19 related issues. In fact, in January 2021, Mr Trump had publicly lamented that Dr Fauci gets favourable media coverage while his role is ignored in managing the pandemic in the US.