Grim toll: US reaches 3M coronavirus cases
The United States on Wednesday reached 3 million documented cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, a virulent bug that crawled into the national consciousness early in the year and is likely to consume the rest of it.
The United States has roughly a quarter of the world’s cases and the same percentage of its deaths.
While many Americans might now be numb to the growing coronavirus toll, avoiding the reality will likely make matters worse.
It took the U.S. a little more than three months to hit 1 million cases on April 28. It took about half that time, 44 days, to get to 2 million on June 11, and only 26 days to reach 3 million on July 8. By that gauge, if no new measures are taken, 4 million cases could be tallied by July 22.
The U.S. leads an unenviable group. Its 3 million cases for a nation of 330 million beats Brazil’s 1.6 million cases (210 million population), India’s 720,000 cases (1.3 billion) and Russia’s 693,000 cases (145 million), according to statistics compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
The U.S. figure dwarfs the 85,000 cases in China, where the virus is thought to have originated. Even allowing for potential underreporting by Chinese authorities, China’s 1.4 billion people make its per capita infection rate one in 16,000. One in 110 Americans has tested positive for the virus.
A few elected U.S. officials seem ready to slow the pace of business reopenings. But others, such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, remain steadfast in their desire to prioritize the economy in a politically charged climate that has turned masks into a divisive symbol.
One reason could be that the number of those killed by the virus (131,000) hasn’t spiked, encouraging those opposed to renewed shutdowns, including President Donald Trump.
COVID-19 deaths long ago rocketed past annual suicides (47,000), common flu (55,000), diabetes (83,000), Alzheimer’s disease (121,000) and are fast coming up on strokes (146,000).
“Like a runner coming from behind in a macabre race, it has surpassed the death toll of many diseases so many Americans consider important,” said Steven Woolf, director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University. “People may get numb to the numbers, until it strikes someone near them.”
Another problem, Woolf said, is the delayed and sometimes insignificant impact of the virus.
“Human beings are used to learning from their behaviors with the immediate response. You touch a hot stove and you get the results right away,” he said. “With this, the people going out and partying and going to the beach and so forth all occurs weeks before the hospitalizations start increasing, so there’s less opportunity for society to learn their lesson from some of these behaviors.”
Death might be the only motivating factor capable of changing U.S. hygiene habits and reopening plans, said Carolyn Marvin, Frances Yates Emeritus Professor of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
“Put simply, I don’t think enough people are dead to create a national consensus that this is a threat the nation must respond to in a unified way,” Marvin said.
Some health experts are unsparing in their views on how the U.S. has mishandled its response to the coronavirus. Although Europe and specifically Italy were hit hard, numbers in many countries have steadily declined due to stiff quarantine rules. New Zealand has eradicated the virus from its island nation.
The U.S. response, despite warnings from the spike in Wuhan, China, in January, was “almost like a delusional level of unpreparedness, that we were somehow superior, and we’re dramatically paying the price for that,” said Jonathan Metzl, director of the Center for Medicine, Health and Society at Vanderbilt University.