U.S. COVID-19 death toll surpasses 500K
COVID-19 deaths in the United States surpassed 500,000 on Monday, the latest desolate way station in a onceuncharted landscape of loss.
The toll is hard to fathom. It’s as if all the people in an American city the size of Atlanta or Sacramento simply vanished. The number is greater than the combined U.S. battlefield deaths in both world wars and Vietnam. Last month, based on average 24hour fatality counts, it was as if the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, had happened every single day.
Recorded U.S. deaths from COVID-19 are about one-fifth of the world’s nearly 2.5 million known fatalities, twice as many as in Brazil, the nexthardest-hit country. California alone accounts for almost 50,000 deaths, about 10% of the country’s total. Nearly 20,000 of those were in Los Angeles County, where about one of every 500 people has died.
Poets and philosophers — and social-science researchers — know that hearing of death on such a mass scale often produces a sense of numbness, that such enormous numbers can become abstractions. For America as a whole, that may be so; for those touched by individual grief, it’s just the opposite.
People who have lost loved ones, or have suffered lasting physical harm from an episode of COVID-19, sometimes speak of feeling stranded on the far side of a great chasm, profoundly alienated from compatriots who wonder when they will be able to go back to bars and baseball games.
President Biden’s chief medical advisor, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said the threshold of half a million deaths is like nothing “we have ever been through in the last 102 years, since the 1918 influenza pandemic.”
U.S. deaths then were a cataclysmic 675,000, though dwarfed by a worldwide toll of some 50 million.
To commemorate the sorrowful half-million benchmark, Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are expected to observe a moment of silence and hold a candle-lighting ceremony at sunset Monday.
The first known U.S. deaths from the coronavirus came in February 2020, although infectious disease specialists believe the virus was circulating in the country before then. In the subsequent year, the outbreak has left few American lives unscathed.
All the ways in which society organizes itself — school and work, economy and governance, friendship and family life, love and romance — have changed, in some instances irrevocably. The contagion has altered end-of-life farewells and rituals of mourning, with wrenching deathbed scenes played out on Facetime and memorials staged on Zoom. Other rites of passage stutter and sputter — weddings deferred, graduations unheralded.
This is not the pandemic’s darkest hour; that may have already passed. New U.S. cases have been falling for five weeks; the vaccine rollout, despite lags and shortages, is trending toward success — although it is also a race against deadly new variants that are circulating in the U.S. and around the world.
Over the past year, the pandemic laid bare shocking U.S. social disparities that were present all along but thrown into stark relief by the crisis. Black people and Latinos are much more likely to suffer devastating medical outcomes. Economic inequities abound, with wealthier work-at-home Americans weathering the outbreak with comparative ease, even while unemployment has soared to levels not seen in decades, leaving millions of American families unable to pay for necessities such as housing and food.