The coronavirus death toll in the United States surpassed 90,000 on Monday as the total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases exceeded 1.5 million across the country, according to the Johns Hopkins University tally. The grim milestones came as President Donald Trump tweeted to “REOPEN OUR COUNTRY!” and the White House attempted to shift blame, including onto its own scientists, for the high number of deaths. On Sunday, members of Trump administration disagreed on whether the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) let the country down with testing efforts. “Early on in this crisis, the CDC, which really had the most trusted brand around the world in this space, really let the country down with the testing,” Peter Navarro, Trump’s trade adviser, told NBC’s Meet the Press programme....
The new coronavirus may never go away and populations around the world will have to learn to live with it, the World Health Organization warned Wednesday. As some countries around the world begin gradually easing lockdown restrictions imposed in a bid to stop the novel coronavirus from spreading, the WHO said it may never be wiped out entirely. The virus first emerged in Wuhan in China late last year and has since infected more than 4.2 million people and killed nearly 300,000 worldwide. “We have a new virus entering the human population for the first time and therefore it is very hard to predict when we will prevail over it,” said Michael Ryan, the WHO’s emergencies director. “This virus may become just another endemic virus in our communities and this virus may never go away,” he told a ...