The U.S. hit 61,000 coronavirus deaths, topping Trump's 60,000 ceiling

The U.S. death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic hit 61,000 Thursday morning, passing the 60,000 level President Trump has repeatedly suggested might be the final death toll from the new coronavirus. There are 1.04 million reported COVID-19 cases in the U.S., nearly a third of the world's total, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins, but real number of cases and deaths is almost certainly significantly higher.

Data released Wednesday night by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics showed at least 66,000 more people have died than normal so far this year, and only 33,765 of them are attributed to the coronavirus. "The problem is you look at the number on your television screen and the number looks real," Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, tells The Associated Press. "What you don't have is that that number should have an asterisk next to it."

Trump now says the million-plus confirmed cases is a triumph of testing and claims the 60,000 figure is a positive sign since earlier estimates predicted 100,000 to 240,000 U.S. coronavirus deaths, or more if the U.S. did not social distance. "Yeah, we've lost a lot of people," Trump said in the Rose Garden on Monday. "But if you look at what original projections were — 2.2 million — we're probably heading to 60,000, 70,000. It's far too many. One person is too many for this."

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The deadliest pandemic in U.S. history was the flu outbreak in 1918-19, which left 675,000 Americans dead, and 61,000 deaths is about on par with the entire 2017-18 flu season and behind the 1967 and 1957 flu seasons, each of with killed more than 100,000 Americans.