US1 min(s) read
Published 17:54 26 Nov 2020 GMT
President-elect Joe Biden has declared that the US is "at war with the virus, not each other" in a rousing Thanksgiving speech where he called for an end to the country's "grim season of division".
As per BBC News, there were over 1.2 million confirmed cases of coronavirus in the US last week and 2,200 people lost their lives to Covid-19 on Tuesday - marking the highest daily death toll in the country since May.
Watch Biden's Thanksgiving address below:
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"None of the steps we are asking people to take are political statements," he added, as he called for unity. "We're at war with a virus. Not one another," Biden said.
"I'm hoping the news of the vaccine will serve as an incentive to every American to take these simple steps to get control of the virus," he said.
"Don't let yourself surrender to the fatigue, which I understand it is real fatigue. I know we can beat this virus. America is not going to lose this war. We'll get our lives back. Life is going to return to normal. I promise you this will happen. This will not last forever."
Meanwhile, this Thanksgiving, Trump repeated his unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud in the November 2020 election.
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He did so while speaking via the phone from the White House at an event organized by Republican state legislators in Pennsylvania.
"We have to turn the election over," he said, adding that it was "rigged".
While Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani attended in person, Trump was unable to after associates of Giuliani tested positive for coronavirus.
The Democratic candidate comfortably won enough electoral college votes to secure the presidency, and, as per the BBC, all of Trump's attempts to challenge the results in key states have so far been unsuccessful.
China's President Xi Jinping finally congratulated Biden on his win on Wednesday almost two weeks after it was projected.
However, Biden has not yet been congratulated by various world leaders including Russia's Vladimir Putin and Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the latter of whom said that he would not reach out to the president-elect until "the electoral process in the US ends".
Biden told the nation in his Wednesday speech: "I believe you always deserve to hear the truth from your president. We have to slow the growth of this virus. We owe it to the doctors and the nurses and the frontline workers... We owe it to our fellow citizens."
He said that Covid-19 has "brought us pain and loss and frustration" and cost many lives.
