AMERICA’S COVID TOLL REACHES 1 MILLION: CDC
The U.S. death toll from COVID-19 hit 1 million on Monday, a once-unimaginable figure that only hints at the multitudes of loved ones and friends staggered by grief and frustration.
“It is hard to imagine a million people plucked from this earth,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, who leads a new pandemic center at the Brown University School of Public Health in Providence, Rhode Island. “It’s still happening, and we are letting it happen.”
Some of those left behind say they cannot return to normal. They replay their loved ones’ voicemail messages. Or watch old videos to see them dance. When other people say they are done with the virus, they bristle with anger or ache in silence.
“‘Normal.’ I hate that word,” said Julie Wallace, 55, of Elyria, Ohio, who lost her husband to COVID. “All of us never get to go back to normal.”
Three out of every four deaths were people 65 and older. More men died than women. White people made up most of the deaths overall. But Black, Hispanic and Native American people have been roughly twice as likely to die from COVID-19 as their white counterparts.
The death toll less than 2oe years into the outbreak is based on death certificate data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics. But the real number of lives lost to COVID-19, either directly or indirectly, as a result of the disruption of the health care system in the world’s richest country, is believed to be far higher.
The U.S. has the highest reported COVID-19 death toll of any country, though experts have long suspected the real number of deaths in places such as India, Brazil and Russia is higher than the official figures.
The U.S. is averaging about 300 COVID-19 deaths per day, compared with a peak of about 3,400 a day in January 2021.
President Joe Biden on Thursday ordered flags lowered to halfstaff and called each life “an irreplaceable loss.”
“As a nation, we must not grow numb to such sorrow,” he said in a statement. “To heal, we must remember.”