US reaches morbid milestone
With the death toll from Covid-19 in the United States approaching half a million – a figure surpassing the number of Americans killed in any conflict since the civil war – President Joe Biden held a solemn ceremony at the White House.
A year after the first deaths from the virus in Santa Clara County, California, the president and the first lady, Jill Biden, along with Kamala Harris, the vice-president, and her husband, Doug Emhoff, marked the deaths with a candle-lighting ceremony. In the hour before the ceremony the National Cathedral in Washington said its bells would toll 500 times.
The death toll had reached 498,000 by yesterday morning, according to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. The World Health Organisation, which measures Covid-19 fatalities differently, put the figure at nearly 494,000.
The US Centres for Disease Control yesterday recorded a figure of 496,000 deaths and nearly 28 million confirmed infections in the United States. Early projections last spring, which seemed dire, envisioned tens of thousands of deaths by the late summer. Some argued that the effect would be not much worse than the yearly flu toll. By August 100,000 had died. By December it was 300,000.
Biden, who campaigned on a message of empathy for families who had lost loved ones, held a ceremony on the eve of his inauguration last month to mark 400,000 lives lost. ‘‘To heal we must remember,’’ he said.
The US has 4 per cent of the global population but accounts for 20 per cent of Covid-19 deaths. The outsized effect of the virus in America has been blamed in part on the nation’s failure to muster a unified response and on the politicisation of measures shown to limit its spread.
‘‘The evidence was pretty compelling by last March or April that uniform wearing of masks would reduce transmission of this disease,’’ Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, told Axios. ‘‘And yet . . . maskwearing became a statement about your political party or an invasion of your personal freedom.’’ He said this may have cost tens of thousands of lives.
The virus now accounts for more deaths than were caused in 2019 by chronic lower respiratory diseases, stroke, Alzheimer’s, flu and pneumonia combined. ‘‘We’ve done worse than almost any other country and we’re a highly developed, rich country,’’ Dr Anthony Fauci, the country’s top infectious disease expert, told CNN. He said it was like nothing ‘‘we have ever been through in the last 102 years, since the 1918 influenza pandemic,’’ which killed 675,000 people in the United States. Daily cases have fallen steadily since January 8, when 315,000 were reported in a single day, to 55,000 on Sunday, according to the CDC.
The WHO said that almost 71,000 people a day are being infected. The daily death toll has fallen, too, and 63 million vaccine doses have been administered, with 18.8 million people receiving both shots. But epidemiologists are warning that the country could face another wave of cases if new variants of the disease take hold before a sufficient proportion of the population has been vaccinated.