US President Donald Trump says 200,000 coronavirus deaths in America is ‘doing it right’

Donald Trump has defended overseeing the world’s highest coronavirus death toll, saying 200,000 Americans amounted to "doing it right" because the mortality rate could potentially have been far higher.

Speaking at his latest campaign rally in Pennsylvania, the president deployed racist attacks on Democratic congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, accusing the former of “telling us how to run our country”.

Trump, who says he will name a US Supreme Court nominee on Saturday, cited the need to have a full roster of nine justices in place ahead of election day on 3 November because "with the unsolicited millions of ballots that they're sending, it’s a scam, it’s a hoax.”

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The United States has passed 200,000 deaths from the coronavirus pandemic, as a record-breaking wave of new infections forces authorities in Europe to reimpose lockdown restrictions.

Earlier, US President Donald Trump – who faces a tough re-election fight and is trailing Democrat Joe Biden in the polls -- said the 200,000 milestone was "a shame" and deflected blame onto China.

Trump used a video address to the annual United Nations General Assembly to attack Beijing for not stopping the spread of what he called the "China virus."

"We must hold accountable the nation which unleashed this plague onto the world – China," he told the UN's diplomatic showcase event, which is being held almost entirely online because of the pandemic.

Trump has repeatedly played down the seriousness of the coronavirus crisis, even as the United States has suffered one of the world's highest death tolls.

According to an AFP tally, worldwide more than 31 million people have been infected and nearly 962,000 have died from Covid-19 since the virus emerged in the eastern Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019.

The World Health Organisation reported late on Monday that almost two million infections were recorded around the globe in the single week to September 20.

The six per cent increase versus the previous week is "the highest number of reported cases in a single week since the beginning of the epidemic", the UN health agency said.

The Independent/Agence France-Presse