The U.S. death toll from COVID-19 surpassed the number of World War II combat fatalities on Thursday night, just hours after a committee of leading U.S. vaccine scientists recommended the Food and Drug Administration authorize the first COVID-19 vaccine for Americans.
The vaccine, though, won t help soon enough, said Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warning that the country s daily death count will likely rival national tragedies such as the 9/11 terror attacks and Pearl Harbor for months. We are in the timeframe now that probably for the next 60 to 90 days we re going to have more deaths per day than we had at 9/11 or we had at Pearl Harbor, Redfield said during at an event hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations, The Hill reported.