Meanwhile

For Americans, coronavirus went from being a mysterious affliction that occurred in far-off lands to 1m confirmed cases on US soil within 14 weeks. Now, just six weeks later, the US has broken through the grim milestone of 2m positive tests for Covid-19, according to the Johns Hopkins University tracker.

  Guardian

And that's only the ones that have been tested.

But further, perhaps far greater pain is yet to come, pandemic experts have warned, even as authorities wave people back into reopened shops and offices and the US president’s political rhetoric on an epochal crisis dwindles away to near silence.

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[Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota] said a society usually becomes resilient to a virus once at least 60% of the population has been infected, either naturally or via a vaccine, and develops antibodies. This is still a far-off point for the US, with no firm guarantee a working vaccine will ever be developed.

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“If all that pain, suffering and economic destruction got us to 5%, what will it take to get us to 60%? That’s a sobering thought. All of that suffering and death is just getting started. People haven’t quite got that yet.”

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“From the beginning there has been misrepresentations and fabrications from the White House,” said [Irwin Redlener, the director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University]. “Whatever the opposite of ‘mission accomplished’ is, that’s what this is. It’s essentially been an American fiasco.”

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Yet even as the US has surged past 100,000 deaths from Covid-19, around a quarter of the entire global total, the crisis has faded from the political agenda.

Trump, preoccupied with sending in the military to crush roiling anti-racism protests over the death of George Floyd, has stopped daily press conferences on the pandemic. Re-openings have been left down to the states, conducted in a somewhat haphazard way with at least a dozen states still experiencing rising rates of infections.

Dr Anthony Fauci, the administration’s top infectious disease expert, has admitted not seeing the president in weeks despite the ongoing public health crisis. “Where is it going to end? We’re still at the beginning of it,” Fauci said this week.