COVID deaths climb past 300K

U.S. crosses threshold as vaccination campaign gets underway

The U.S. death toll from the coronavirus topped 300,000 Monday just as the country began dispensing COVID-19 shots in a monumental campaign to conquer the outbreak.

The number of dead rivals the population of St. Louis or Pittsburgh. It is equivalent to repeating a tragedy on the scale of Hurricane Katrina every day for 5½ months. It is more than five times the number of Americans killed in the Vietnam War.

It is equal to a 9/11 attack every day for more than 100 days.

“The numbers are staggering: the most impactful respiratory pandemic that we have experienced in over 102 years, since the iconic 1918 Spanish flu,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious-disease expert, said days before the milestone.

The U.S. crossed the threshold on the same day health care workers rolled up their sleeves for Pfizer’s COVID-19 shot, marking the start of the biggest vaccination campaign in American history. If a second vaccine is authorized soon, as expected, 20 million people could be immunized by month’s end.

The death toll was reported by Johns Hopkins University from data supplied by health authorities across the U.S. The real number of lives lost is believed to be much higher, in part because of deaths that were not accurately recorded as coronavirus-related during the early stages of the crisis.

Experts say it could take well into spring for the shots and other measures to bring the case and death numbers under control in the U.S.

With cold weather driving people inside, where the virus spreads more easily, and many Americans disdainful of masks and other precautions, some public health authorities project that 100,000 more could die before the end of January.

“We are heading into probably the worst period possible because of all the things we had in the spring, which is fatigue, political resistance, maybe the loss of all the good will we had about people doing their part,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, a public health researcher at Johns Hopkins. In other developments:

■ Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and Surgeon General Jerome Adams stressed the vaccine’s safety and effectiveness, while raising issues of social equity. The officials spoke Monday at a George Washington University Hospital event.

■ The state of Iowa is returning

$21 million of federal coronavirus aid money it planned to spend on upgrading state information technology systems, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds said Monday.

■ U.S. Sen. Angus King, an independent from Maine, wants major streaming services to give Americans an incentive to stay home and stay safe during the holiday season. King said Monday he’s asked six major streaming services to temporarily make their movies, television series and other content free. King made his request in a letter to the leaders of Netflix, Disney +, Apple TV +, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu and HBO Max.