COVID-19 cases top 5 million in US with odds for highly effective vaccine ‘not great’
As kids across the nation prepare to head back to school, more than 5 million people in the United States have been confirmed with coronavirus, Johns Hopkins University reports.
There have been more than 19.6 million confirmed cases of the COVID-19 virus worldwide, with more than 727,000 deaths, according to the university. More than 162,000 people have died in the United States.
The United States leads the world in confirmed cases, followed by Brazil with more than 3 million cases and India with more than 2.1 million, Johns Hopkins University reported.
Five states — California, Florida, Texas, New York and Georgia — account for more than 40% of U.S. infections, CNN reported..
More than 11.9 million people around the world have recovered from coronavirus, including more than 1.6 million in the United States, according to Johns Hopkins University.
The milestone comes amid a resurgence of the COVID-19 virus, which originated in China, across much of the United States as the new school year opens.
A report from the American Academy of Pediatrics finds that 97,000 children in the United States tested positive for coronavirus in the last two weeks of July, CBS News reported.
Infectious diseases expert Dr. Anthony Fauci says chances of developing a highly effective vaccine against the virus are “not great,” CNBC reported.
“You’ve got to think of the vaccine as a tool to be able to get the pandemic to no longer be a pandemic, but to be something that’s well controlled,” Fauci said, according to the network.
A highly effective vaccine would be more than 90% effective at preventing coronavirus from spreading, but medical experts are hoping for at least a 50% effective vaccine, on par with annual flu vaccines.
The coronavirus outbreak began in December in Wuhan, China, possibly after the virus passed to humans from bats and pangolins, an Asian scaly anteater, McClatchy News reported.
COVID-19, named because it’s a new type of coronavirus first seen in 2019, comes from a family of viruses responsible for the common cold, SARS, MERS and other ailments.
The World Health Organization has declared coronavirus a global pandemic. In the United States, President Donald Trump has declared a national emergency.
