A GRIM MILESTONE
US death toll passes 200,000 as new cases rise in many states
The coronavirus death toll in the United States surpassed 200,000 on Tuesday, marking another milestone of loss at a time when many have become numb to the rising fatality count.
The tally represents the upper boundary of a fatality range that President Trump in March said would signal that his administration had “done a very good job” of protecting Americans from the coronavirus. As he left the White House for Pennsylvania on Tuesday evening, Trump responded to a reporter’s question about the 200,000 deaths, saying, “It’s a shame.”
The number of dead is roughly equal to the population of Salt Lake City or Huntsville, Alabama.
And it is still climbing. Deaths are 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.
The disease has torn through families across the nation, and in New Mexico, the virus has infected 27,790 people and claimed 854 lives.
One New Mexico family that has suffered from the pandemic is Mariaelena Lopez’s. Both she and her brother were infected, and it killed her 71-year-old mother, Maxine Roybal Lopez. On April 1, Lopez died at the University of New Mexico Hospital as a nurse held her hand.
She was the seventh person in the state to die of COVID-19.
Mariaelena Lopez says that as she watches the death toll climb, she thinks of all the families going through what she went through just months ago.
“I know the heartache that comes with it,” she said. “I know losing anyone is very difficult, but to lose them to this virus and to not be able to be there with them, that’s, again, the most difficult thing.”
Worrisome trends
Progress in slowing the march of the novel coronavirus has stalled recently in much of the United States, and the pathogen is spreading at dangerous rates in many states as autumn arrives and colder weather — traditionally congenial to viruses — begins to settle across the nation, public health data shows.
Organizations that track the virus, including The Washington Post, have logged recent increases in case numbers and test positivity rates — worrisome trends as the nation reached 200,000 deaths. Hospitalizations and deaths remain lower nationally than at their midsummer peak, but those numbers always lag several weeks behind trends in new infections.
On Twitter, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden said,
“It didn’t have to be this bad.”
“It’s a staggering number that’s hard to wrap your head around,” he said. “There’s a devastating human toll to this pandemic — and we can’t forget that.”
For five months, America has led the world by far in sheer numbers of confirmed infections — nearly 6.9 million as of 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.”
Black and Hispanic people and Native Americans 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 nearly 967,000 lives lost, by Johns Hopkins’ count, though the real numbers are believed to be higher because of gaps in testing and reporting.
In the U.S., 27 states and Puerto Rico have shown an increase in the seven-day average of new confirmed cases since the final week of August, according to The Post’s analysis of public health data. Minnesota, Montana, Oklahoma, Puerto Rico, Utah, Wisconsin and Wyoming set record highs Monday for seven-day averages.
The global picture has reaffirmed that COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, is not about to fade away. Countries that had been successful early in the pandemic in driving down viral transmission — such as Israel, France and Spain — are struggling with new waves of cases and instituting new shutdowns. Most people remain susceptible to infection, and the virus is highly contagious.
“No country is safe,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “No country at this point can ever relax and assume the worst is behind them.”
It is too soon to know whether a major autumn surge in infections, something long feared among infectious-disease experts, has started on a broad national scale. Short-term statistical trends can be influenced by quirks in testing and reporting. Moreover, experts caution that they cannot predict human behavior and that any forecast beyond a few weeks is speculative.
What is certain is that the United States, like so many other nations, remains in a precarious position amid the most disruptive pandemic in more than a century. Health officials uniformly are urging the public to avoid complacency and instead maintain the precautions, such as maskwearing and social distancing, that have been effective in limiting infections.
“It’s a very vulnerable moment because, first of all, we’re headed in the wrong direction,” Nuzzo said. “The case numbers are going up. The positives are going up.”
Fears for fall
Michael Osterholm, a University of Minnesota epidemiologist, said, “I think we’re just in the beginning of what’s going to be a marked increase in cases in the fall. And it won’t be just a testing artifact, either. This is real.”
Disease trackers are watching the virus’s reproductive number — the number of people infected, on average, by each infected person. When that number goes over one, exponential viral spread results. Columbia University epidemiologist Jeffrey Shaman said Monday that his team’s coronavirus model showed that 579 counties in the United States, many of them in the Midwest and the Mississippi Valley, had a reproductive number over one as of Sunday.
In an interview Tuesday with a Detroit TV station, Trump said his administration had done an “amazing” and “incredible” job against the virus.
And in a prerecorded speech to the U.N. General Assembly, he demanded that Beijing be held accountable for having “unleashed this plague onto the world.”
China’s ambassador rejected the accusations as baseless.
White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow said Monday that the United States had “regained control” of the virus.
But scientists and doctors have consistently warned that public vigilance and common-sense precautions — the simplest being hand-washing — are key to fighting the virus. The virus is circulating almost everywhere in the country and will exploit public complacency.
“When we let up, the virus resurges,” Gerald said. “When we clamp down, it recedes. So it is a roller coaster of ups and downs.”
The pandemic has been a long grind for everyone, but people need to realize they have to be prepared for it to last quite a bit longer, Nuzzo said. That does not mean sheltering in place and never going outside, she said. Health experts urge people to avoid excessive isolation because of the psychological toll.
But they also warn against thinking the crisis will suddenly go away even if, in a given community, the pandemic seems to be in retreat.
“It’s almost like the eye of the storm,” said David Rubin, director of PolicyLab at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, which has a model that forecasts transmission in counties throughout the nation. “You come out from this resurgence during summer, and it’s like you’ve broken through the eyewall. And it’s suddenly calm. ... It gives you this false sense of security, that maybe we’re through the worst when in fact you’re about to go through the other side of the eyewall.”
The Washington Post’s Joel Achenbach, Karin Brulliard, Danielle Douglas-Gabriel and Jacqueline Dupree contributed to this report. Associated Press writers Carla Johnson, Kelli Kennedy and Tammy Webber, as well as Albuquerque Journal assistant city editor Katy Barnitz, also contributed to this story.