The United States edged close to registering 200,000 COVID-19 deaths on Monday, according to a rolling tally by Johns Hopkins University and quoted by AFP . 199,743 Americans have died and 6.8 million have been confirmed infected, the tally showed. The US has had the world's highest official death toll for months, ahead of Brazil and India, with 136,895 and 87,882 deaths respectively. Overall, the US accounts for four percent of the world's population and 20 percent of its coronavirus deaths, while its daily fatality rate relative to the overall population is four times greater than that of the European Union. US President Donald Trump said in an interview on "Fox and Friends" Monday that the United States was "rounding the corner with or without a vaccine." "I would say that you'll have (a vaccine) long before the end of the year, maybe by the end of October," he said, adding that his priority was "total safety -- it's number one." Meanwhile, Trump’s Democratic rival, Joe Biden, blasted the President and asserted the statistics expose the Trump administration's failure to meet its sternest test ahead of the November 3 election. "Due to Donald Trump's lies and incompetence in the past six months, (we) have seen one of the gravest losses of American life in history," Biden charged on Monday. "With this crisis, a real crisis, a crisis that required serious presidential leadership, he just wasn't up to it. He froze. He failed to act. He panicked. And America has paid the worst price of any nation in the world," added Biden. Trump said last week that the US government could start distributing a coronavirus vaccine as early as October. “We’re very close to that vaccine as you know and I think much closer than I think most people want to say,” Trump said during a White House press briefing. Last week, BioNTech CEO and co-founder Ugur Sahin said that Pfizer and BioNTech are confident they can have a vaccine against coronavirus ready for regulatory approval by the middle of October or early November. The Trump administration several weeks ago urged US states to get ready to distribute a potential COVID-19 vaccine by November 1.
