U.S. COVID-19 deaths reach new benchmark of 500,000

The U.S. reaches its half-a-million mark as the rest of the world has suffered more than 2,462,000, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University, NBC news reports. The U.S. death toll is the highest in the world, with only approximately 5% of the global population.

In President Joe Biden's first three weeks in office, more than 60,000 U.S. coronavirus deaths occurred, a death toll exceeding that of the American death toll in the Vietnam War, the Washington Free Beacon reports.

NBC News' tally showed that 500,001 people had died of Covid-19 as of Sunday afternoon, a number more than double the count of Americans who died in battle in World War II, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs.

The CDC's live tracker shows that over 13,000 people have died from COVID-19 in the last seven days in the U.S.

"We are still at about 100,000 cases a day. We are still at around 1,500 to 3,500 deaths per day. The cases are more than two-and-a-half-fold times what we saw over the summer," Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said.

"It's encouraging to see these trends coming down, but they're coming down from an extraordinarily high place," she continued.