‘Don’t become numb’ to loss after 700G die
A day after the U.S. surpassed 700,000 COVID-19 deaths, President Biden mourned the dead — and urged people to get vaccinated.
“To heal we must remember, and as our nation mourns the painful milestone of 700,000 American deaths due to COVID-19, we must not become numb to the sorrow,” he said in a statement released by the White House on Saturday. “On this day, and every day, we remember all those we have lost to this pandemic and we pray for their loved ones who are missing a piece of their soul.”
The 78-year-old commander-in-chief, who received a booster dose of vaccine on Monday, urged the unvaccinated to give it a shot.
Biden said “the astonishing death toll is yet another reminder of just how important it is to get vaccinated.”
The president pleaded, “If you haven’t already, please get vaccinated. It can save your life and the lives of those you love. It will help us beat COVID-19 and move forward, together, as one nation.”
As the death toll continues to climb, the worst hot spot is Alaska.
One person in every 84 in the Last Frontier was diagnosed with COVID-19 from Sept. 22-29, according to Johns Hopkins University data. The next highest rate was 1-in-164 people in West Virginia.
As a result, three Alaska hospitals have instituted crisis protocols that would allow them to ration care if needed. The affected hospitals are in Fairbanks, Anchorage and Bethel.
Fairbanks Chief Medical Officer Dr. Angelique Ramirez said the decision to move to crisis standards was because of many factors, including community spread caused by the low vaccination rates and a high number of patients waiting to be admitted.
Across the country, tens of millions of Americans have refused to get vaccinated, allowing the highly contagious delta variant to tear through the U.S. and send the death toll from 600,000 to 700,000 in 3½ months.
Florida had the highest death toll during that period, with the virus killing about 17,000 residents since the middle of June. Texas was second with 13,000 deaths. Those two states account for 15% of the country’s population, but more than 30% of the nation’s deaths since the U.S. crossed the 600,000 threshold.
Dr. David Dowdy, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins, said it’s safe to say at least 70,000 of the last 100,000 deaths were in unvaccinated people. And of those vaccinated people who died with breakthrough infections, most caught the virus from an unvaccinated person, he said.
The first known deaths in the U.S. from the virus came in 2020. Four months later, the toll hit 100,000.
“I remember when we broke that 100,000-death mark, people just shook their heads and said ‘Oh, my God,’ ” said Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association. “Then we said, ‘Are we going to get to 200,000?’ Then we kept looking at 100,000-death marks.”
The toll eventually surpassed the estimated 675,000 American deaths from the 1918-19 flu pandemic, and the current total is more than the population of Boston.