WASHINGTON: The coronavirus death toll in United States passed the stark benchmark of 100,000 on Tuesday as the World Health Organisation (WHO) warned against a second peak of this deadly disease.

Agencies monitoring the spread of this virus in the country, reported that by Tuesday afternoon, the death toll in the United States had 100,030. The daily death toll, however, remained low as 505 deaths were reported on Monday and 225 by Tuesday afternoon.

At one stage, 2,000 plus deaths were reported daily, with more than half of them in New York alone. But on Monday, New York reported only 79 deaths. Daily recorded Covid-10 cases in the United States have also come down to 7,000+ from a record high of 20,000+ a day.

The Trump administration, which has been trying to reopen the US economy since early April, used this improvement to resume normal activities. By last week, all 50 states had resumed at least some businesses. Vehicles were back on the road as well, although not anywhere near the pre-coronavirus days.

Millions also took advantage of the three-day weekend, which coincided with the Eid holidays, to visit beaches, parks, and other public spaces. Some television channels showed crowded beaches in Florida and California while crowds were also witnessed at shopping malls.

Worried by this eagerness to return to normalcy, a number of physicians and public health experts appeared on US channels on Tuesday, to warn against “a second wave” if precautionary measures were abandoned.

The US media also highlighted a warning by Mike Ryan, head of the WHO’s emergencies program, that “the disease can jump up at any time.” The WHO official included North America, Southeast Asia, Europe among the regions where infections could go back to where they were a month ago.

“We need to be also cognizant of the fact that the disease can jump up at any time. We cannot make assumptions that just because the disease is on the way down now that it’s going to keep going down,” he said.

A former head of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) connected a disease uptick in some states with the rush to reopen.

“We now see a trend in an uptick in hospitalisations. It is a small uptick, but it is an uptick, and it is unmistakable,” said former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb. “And it is probably a result of reopening,” he said in a CNBC interview on Tuesday. “We expected cases to go up and hospitalisations to bump up when we reopened.”

At least 5.5 million coronavirus infections have been reported around the world — more than 1.6 million of them in the United States.

The United States has also suspended entry for anyone who has been to Brazil in the previous 14 days, as the number of cases in the South American country spiked.

Published in Dawn, May 27th, 2020