With the European Union revealing a huge recovery strategy to step up its emergence from the crisis, the U.S. figure was a sobering suggestion of the devastation being wreaked around the world by a virus that just emerged late last year.
Confirmed U.S. deaths stood at 1,00,396 late Wednesday, with nearly 1.7 million infections, according to the tally assembled by Johns Hopkins University.
Nevertheless, many U.S. states moved towards resuming dining establishments and organisations, cheered on by President Donald Trump, who is excited to see the financial discomfort of the crisis mitigated as he looks for re-election.