The confirmed United States death toll from COVID-19 has passed 200,000, according to Johns Hopkins University.

Experts say due to increases of cases in more than half-of-the-nation, that number will likely keep rising.

President Donald Trump says he pleaded with those on his administration handling the pandemic.

"On the job itself, we take an A-plus.  We're rounding the corner on the pandemic and we've done a phenomenal job.  Not just a good job, a phenomenal job,'" says President Trump.

Some of President Trump’s top advisers say the country has the upper hand on COVID-19.

 "We've regained control of the virus, both the cases and the fatalities," says Larry Kudlow, White House economic adviser. "We've had mixed messaging on everything from masks, to whether certain drugs or treatments work, to whether we should be social-distancing or whether lockdowns are needed. And I think this is yet another nail in the coffin of our disastrous response," says Dr. Celine Gounder, of the NYU School of Medicine.

According to Johns Hopkins University, more than two dozen states are seeing a rise in week-to-week new cases,and the death toll keeps climbing.

"Sometimes that's the perception that it was a bad virus, we did all we could and this was inevitable.  It's obviously not the case, I mean you just need to look around the world," says Dr. Sanjay Gupta, the CNN chief medical correspondent.

The United States accounts for 4% of the world's population, but has about 21% of all coronavirus fatalities.

"This is a time not to look backward, but to look ahead and say what can we do as a nation to come together so that we're not talking about 300,000 deaths and 400,000 deaths," says Dr. Richard Besser.

Dr. Robert Redfield, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, says a vaccine probably won't be available to much of the public until the middle of 2021.