US coronavirus deaths top 40,000: Johns Hopkins

The number of deaths from the new coronavirus in the United States topped 40,000 on Sunday, according to a running tally by Johns Hopkins University.

It showed fatalities countrywide had reached 40,585, with almost half of them in New York, whose governor Andrew Cuomo said the outbreak there is now "on the descent."

The US toll exceeds that of Italy, which has the second-highest number of deaths at 23,660, according to Johns Hopkins.

The tracker shows a total US caseload of 742,442—nearly four times that of Spain, which has almost 196,000 cases.