WASHINGTON: As the United States announced its highest single-day death toll on Wednesday, the US Army said it plans to start testing new Covid-19 vaccines on humans in September.

Statistics released by various monitoring agencies showed that a total of 2,804 coronavirus patients died in the United States on Tuesday, surpassing the previous high of about 2,500 deaths in a day, recorded last week. By Wednesday afternoon, 800 more deaths were added to the list while infections had climbed to almost 825,000.

As the death tolls began to rise again, a leading US model upped its projected death toll by August to 66,000, a 10 per cent increase from its previous prediction.

Also, the director of the US Centers for Disease Control and prevention (CDC) warned that a second coronavirus outbreak could emerge during next winter’s flu season, causing a more dire health crisis.

On Tuesday afternoon, the Pentagon released the transcript of a briefing by US Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy that the army planned to start human-testing of coronavirus vaccines as early as September if the animals now being tested developed antibodies after receiving a new prototype vaccine.

“The Walter Reed Army Institute of Research has now produced three vaccine types, with the Army planning to select one to move forward to initial clinical testing in humans,” Mr McCarthy said.

Candidates for human testing would start arriving at Washington’s Walter Reed Institute of Research in June this year and the test would begin as soon as a vaccine prototype was declared safe for human experimentation.

“Once your immune system comes into contact with a disease and defeats it, it creates antibodies. The testing on mice is to make sure they are creating the antibodies,” Terry Welch, the institute’s communications director told reporters.

Mr McCarthy said the White House Covid-19 task force has urged the army’s top tier scientists to substantially strengthen and expand US Covid-19 testing.

“We’re coordinating closely with other US government partners to … accelerate vaccine development” and also “have asked industry partners for help,” he said.

Reports in the US media indicated that scientists and researchers were keen to find a cure or develop a vaccine before the virus struck again.

CDC Director Robert Redfield warned in an interview to The Washington Post that “the assault of the virus … next winter will actually be even more difficult than the one we just went through.”

This time “the flu epidemic and the coronavirus epidemic (could happen) at the same time,” he said, adding that this “dual assault” on an already strained health care system could have devastating consequences.

CDC statistics show that last year, the flu killed at least 34,200 Americans and made an estimated 35.5 million people sick. White House coronavirus task force coordinator Dr Deborah Birx, when asked to comment on this warning, said: “I don’t know if it will be worse, I think this has been pretty bad. … We’re going to continue that surveillance from now all the way through to be able to give us that early warning signal.”

Published in Dawn, April 23rd, 2020