The US passed a grim milestone, with more than a million cases of Covid-19 recorded.

There are now 3,098,391 confirmed cases worldwide and 216,160 deaths, Johns Hopkins University says.

The House of Representatives has abandoned plans to return to Washington next week. Several states, including Georgia and Texas, have pressed ahead with plans to reopen amid the infection rise.

President Donald Trump was speaking earlier at a White House event about supporting small businesses through the coronavirus pandemic.

As he closed the event, President Trump expressed his pride at the work being done by his government and tried to compare the scale of the outbreak with the Spanish Flu pandemic.

He said: “We’re going through a period of time the likes of which we’ve never seen in this country before, certainly even if you go back into 1917 – it was the worst of all time but it was also not as bad here.

“It was very bad, it was very rough – it was a bad one. But it wasn’t quite like what we’re going through right now.”

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However, the Spanish Flu pandemic happened in 1918, not 1917. It also had a far higher death toll than the coronavirus pandemic has had so far.

According to Johns Hopkins University tracking, more than 50 million people died of Spanish Flu worldwide while the current death toll from the coronavirus is about 216,000.

Some 675,000 Americans died in the 1918 pandemic, while some 58,000 are thought to have died with Covid-19.

In other developments, the organizers of the Academy Awards have announced that they will bend their own rules to let films only released on streaming platforms be eligible for nomination.

Under current rules, films have to be screened in a cinema in Los Angeles for at least seven days to qualify for awards.

On April 28, Academy president David Rubin and CEO Dawn Hudson said in a statement that their commitment to theatre releases was “unchanged and unwavering” but said the pandemic has made the rule change necessary.

The Academy’s new policy is only temporary while most cinemas are closed because of coronavirus.

Many scheduled movie releases have been completely delayed by the pandemic.