US could have reduced COVID-19 deaths by 30-40 pct: former health official

WASHINGTON -- The United States could have saved tens of thousands of lives if certain measures against COVID-19 were well implemented in the country in early stages of the pandemic, a former health official has said.

"I believe if we had fully implemented the mask mandates, the reduction in indoor dining ... and we had increased testing, that we probably could have decreased fatalities into the 30 percent less to 40 percent less range," Deborah Birx, the White House COVID-19 response coordinator under the Donald Trump administration, told a congressional panel in a closed-door hearing earlier this month.

Birx, in her testimony made public this week, also said that she thinks the 2020 elections "took people's time away from and distracted them away from the pandemic."

The United States has reported more than 45 million COVID-19 infections and 743,000 deaths, both the highest in the world, according to data provided by Johns Hopkins University.

Two-thirds of the U.S. population has received at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccines, while less than 60 percent has been fully vaccinated, official figures show.