Washinton, Jan 20 : The Trump administration's incompetence in handling Covid-19 has drawn harsh criticism from the academia as the country's death toll from the disease topped another chilling mark of 4,00,000 on Tuesday. Never before in the recent century has an American President witnessed such a tragic loss of lives. The number is fast approaching the 4,05,000 US fatalities during World War II and the pandemic is among the deadliest events in the country. The 1918 flu pandemic killed 6,75,000 Americans and at least 50 million worldwide, the Xinhua news agency reported. "What's so troubling about this loss of life is it was preventable," but "we did not mount a response to wage war against this virus," said Steven Woolf, director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University. Thomas Whalen, an associate professor at Boston University and an expert on the American presidency, launched a more scathing attack on the President, saying Donald Trump repeatedly downplayed the public severity of the pathogen. "He knew this was a threat and really did not do what was necessary to respond to it in a thoughtful and resourceful way," Whalen said of Trump. Surging infections in the North American country still show no sign of abating, averaging more than 2,30,000 new confirmed cases and 3,000 deaths per day in January. /IANS