200,000 DEAD
US death toll from virus tops an ‘unfathomable’ mark — and the number is still climbing
The U.S. death toll from the coronavirus topped 200,000 Tuesday, by far the highest in the world, hitting the once-unimaginable threshold six weeks before an election that is certain to be a referendum in part on President Donald Trump’s handling of the crisis.
“It is completely unfathomable that we’ve reached this point,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, a Johns Hopkins University public health researcher, eight months after the scourge first reached the world’s richest nation, with its state-ofthe-art laboratories, top-flight scientists and stockpiles of medical supplies.
The number of dead is equivalent to a 9/ 11 attack every day for 67 days. It is roughly equal to the population of Salt Lake City or Huntsville, Alabama.
And it is still climbing. Deaths are running at close to 770 a day on average, and a widely cited model from the University of Washington predicts the U.S. toll will double to 400,000 by the end of the year as schools and colleges reopen and cold weather sets in.
A vaccine is unlikely to become widely available until 2021.
“The idea of 200,000 deaths is really very sobering, in some respects stunning,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious-disease expert, said on CNN.
The bleak milestone was reported by Johns Hopkins, based on figures supplied by state health authorities. But the real toll is thought to be much higher, in part because many COVID -19 deaths were probably ascribed to other causes, especially early on, before widespread testing.
Trump boasted of doing an “amazing” and “incredible” job against the scourge in an interview Tuesday with a Detroit TV station.
For five months, America has led the world by far in sheer numbers of confirmed infections — nearly 6.9 million Tuesday — and deaths. The U.S. has less than 5% of the globe’s population but more than 20% of the reported deaths.
Brazil is No. 2 with about 137,000 deaths, followed by India with approximately 89,000 and Mexico with around 74,000. Only five countries — Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Spain and Brazil — rank higher in COVID-19 deaths per capita.
“All the world’s leaders took the same test, and some have succeeded and some have failed,” said Dr. Cedric Dark, an emergency physician at Baylor College of Medicine in hard-hit Houston. “In the case of our country, we failed miserably.”
Blacks, Hispanics and American Indians have accounted for a disproportionate share of the deaths, underscoring the economic and health care disparities in the U.S.
Worldwide, the virus has infected more than 31 million people and is closing in fast on 1 million deaths, with over 966,000 lives lost, by Johns Hopkins’ count.
Trump downplayed the threat early on, advanced unfounded notions about the behavior of the virus, promoted unproven or dangerous treatments, complained that too much testing was making the U.S. look bad, and disdained masks, turning face coverings into a political issue.
On April 10, he predicted the U.S. wouldn’t see 100,000 deaths. That milestone was reached May 27.
Nowhere was the lack of leadership seen as more crucial than in testing.
“We have from the very beginning lacked a national testing strategy,” Nuzzo said.
Roberto Tobias Jr., 17, of New York City, lost his mother and father to COVID-19 a month apart in the spring. He and his sister also contracted the virus but recovered.
Tobias is now applying to college, hoping to get into Columbia University and become a neurosurgeon.
“Because it’s just me and my sister, we sort of have to rely on each other,” he said. “We were the only blood left.”
Dark said that before the crisis, “people used to look to the United States with a degree of reverence. For democracy. For our moral leadership in the world. Supporting science and using technology to travel to the moon.”
“Instead,” he said, “what’s really been exposed is how anti-science we’ve become.”