‘Tragic and completely avoidable’: US hits 700,000 Covid-19 deaths

Joe Biden laments astonishing death toll' as 100,000 die since June despite the availability of vaccines

The Covid-19 death toll in the US has now surpassed 700,000, despite the Covid-19 vaccines' wide availability, in what one expert called a tragic and completely avoidable milestone".

Data from Johns Hopkins University shows that the US went just past 700,000 deaths on Friday; the US had previously reached 600,000 deaths in June. The country has had a total of 43.6m confirmed cases of Covid-19 since the start of the pandemic, according to Johns Hopkins.