US accounts for nearly 20% of COVID-19 deaths worldwide
The United States has reported approximately 19.6% of the world's COVID-19 deaths.
Just over a month after exceeding 300,000 confirmed deaths from the disease, the country is on track to hit yet another staggering milestone: 400,000 deaths in less than a year, according to data collected by Johns Hopkins University.
To put that in perspective, 400,000 people could fill New York City's Madison Square Garden nearly 20 times over, or is roughly equivalent to the entire population of Tampa, Florida, or Tulsa, Oklahoma. The figure is more than the number of American soldiers who died in battle during World War I, World War II and the Vietnam War combined, according to a data estimate compiled by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
During a White House coronavirus task force press briefing on March 29, President Donald Trump said that if the U.S. could keep its COVID-19 death toll between 100,000 to 200,000, it would mean that his administration had done "a very good job."
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But the death toll has already far surpassed the task force's early estimates, and now President-elect Joe Biden's incoming administration is warning that the "dark winter" is not over yet. Dr. Rochelle Walensky, whom Biden has nominated to serve as the next director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told CBS's "Face the Nation" on Sunday that they "expect half a million deaths in this country" from COVID-19 by mid-February.
The U.S. is currently averaging over 3,300 new COVID-19 deaths per day. The country has registered more than 52,000 deaths from the disease just since the start of the month, which is approximately one American death from COVID-19 reported every 30 seconds.
However, COVID-19 hospitalizations nationwide appear to be stabilizing. The number of patients hospitalized with the disease across the country continues to drop, now standing at 124,387. Arizona, Nevada and Alabama currently hold the highest COVID-19 hospitalizations rates per million people in the country.
ABC News' Brian Hartman and Arielle Mitropoulos contributed to this report.