A vial of the Pfizer vaccine against the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is seen as medical staff are vaccinated at Sheba Medical Center in Ramat Gan, Israel December 19, 2020. Picture taken December 19, 2020. Photo: REUTERS/Amir Cohen

i24 News – The death toll from Covid-19 in the United States surpassed 700,000 on Friday, according to figures from Johns Hopkins University, amid a resurgence in cases due to the highly contagious delta variant.

The grim threshold comes with an average of well over 1,000 dying each day, in a country where 55.7 percent of the population is now fully vaccinated, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

After a heavily criticized early response to the pandemic during Donald Trump’s final months in office, the United States mounted an effective vaccine rollout, though a significant portion of Americans are still refusing to get the shots.

Florida suffered by far the most death of any state during that period, with the virus killing some 17,000 residents since the middle of June. Texas was second with 13,000 deaths. The two states account for 15% of the country’s population, but more than 30% of the nation’s deaths since the nation crossed the 600,000 threshold.

The US finds itself having notched the most fatalities in the world, exceeding other frontrunners such as Brazil and India; unlike those two countries, it is not part of the global trend of decrease in morbidity.

The vaccination campaign launched by US authorities in December has slowed considerably.

Coronavirus misinformation has been rampant in the country, and masking remains a hot-button issue, dividing many Americans.