A casket is placed into a van outside of a funeral home in the heavily Orthodox Borough Park neighborhood of Brooklyn which has scene a large number of deaths due to the coronavirus on April 19, 2020 in New York City. Spencer Platt/Getty Images/AFP
WASHINGTON — The number of coronavirus deaths in the United States rose by almost 2,000 in the past 24 hours to reach 40,661 on Sunday, a tally from Johns Hopkins University showed.
The rise in deaths, by 1,997, is marginally above the 1,891 which Johns Hopkins data showed a day earlier for the previous 24-hour period to Saturday.
Sunday’s figure came on the same day that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said the epidemic in his hardest-hit state is “past the high point.”
The 24-hour tally in the United States had exceeded 2,500 on Wednesday, Johns Hopkins data showed.
Deaths from COVID-19 in the United States are by far the highest of any country, as is the total number of cases which on Sunday reached 759,086, according to Johns Hopkins.