San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
U.S. deaths from COVID-19 closing in on 500,000.
Last March, officials warned of potential for 250K deaths
A nation numbed by misery and loss is confronting a number that still has the power to shock: 500,000.
Roughly one year since the first known death by the coronavirus in the United States, an unfathomable toll is nearing — the loss of a halfmillion people.
No other country has counted so many deaths in the pandemic. More Americans have perished from COVID-19 than on the battlefields of World War I, World War II and the Vietnam War combined.
The milestone comes at a hopeful moment: New virus cases are down sharply, deaths are slowing, and vaccines are steadily being administered.
But there is concern about emerging variants of the virus, and it may be months before the pandemic is contained.
Each death has left untold numbers of mourners, a ripple effect of loss that has swept over towns and cities. Each death has left an empty space in communities across America: a bar stool where a regular used to sit, one side of a bed unslept in, a home kitchen without its cook.
The living find themselves amid vacant places once occupied by their spouses, parents, neighbors and friends — the nearly 500,000 coronavirus dead.
In Chicago, the Rev. Ezra Jones stands at his pulpit on Sundays, letting his eyes wander to the back row. That spot belonged to Moses Jones, his uncle, who liked to drive to church in his green Chevy Malibu, arrive early and chat everybody up before settling into his seat by the door. He died of the coronavirus in April.
“I can still see him there,” said Jones, the pastor. “It never goes away.”
There is a street corner in Plano, Texas, that was occupied by Bob Manus, a veteran crossing guard who shepherded children to school for 16 years, until he fell ill in December.
The virus has reached every corner of America, devastating dense cities and rural counties alike. By now, about 1 in 670 Americans has died of it.
In New York City, more than 28,000 people have died of the virus — or 1 in 295 people. In Los Angeles County, which has lost nearly 20,000 people to COVID-19, about 1 in 500 people has died of the virus. In Lamb County, Texas, where 13,000 people live scattered on a sprawling expanse of 1,000 square miles, 1 in 163 people has died of the virus.
One year ago, as the coronavirus took hold in the United States, few public health experts predicted its death toll would climb to such a terrible height.
At a White House briefing March 31, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top infectious disease expert in the country, and Dr. Deborah Birx, who was coordinating the coronavirus response at the time, announced a stunning projection: Even with strict stay-athome orders, the virus might kill as many as 240,000 Americans.
“As sobering a number as that is, we should be prepared for it,” Fauci said at the time.
Less than a year later, the virus has killed more than twice that number.
As the United States approaches 500,000 deaths from the coronavirus, there are few events in history that adequately compare.
The 1918 influenza pandemic is estimated to have killed about 675,000 Americans, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, when the country’s population was onethird of what it is now. But it also happened at a time when influenza vaccines, antibiotics, mechanical ventilation and other medical tools did not exist yet.
Drew Gilpin Faust, a historian and former president of Harvard University, said medical and societal achievements in the United States had caused many Americans to believe that “we were ready for anything — that we had conquered nature.”
“When there were field hospitals in Central Park, and bodies piled up because there was no capacity to bury them, we were just so shocked at ourselves and had not thought this would ever happen to us,” said Faust, whose book “This Republic of Suffering” explores how Americans grappled with death after the Civil War. “That sense of mastery over nature has been so seriously challenged by this pandemic.”
Although daily deaths are now slowing, about 1,900 deaths in America are being reported each day. By Friday night, the toll had reached 495,572.