In the United States, more than 1 million people have died from COVID-19, according to a Reuters count; in this country.
The milestone of 1 million deaths was surpassed at a time when the threat posed by SARS-CoV-2 tends to be downplayed by many. It means that one in 327 Americans has died, or in other words the entire population of cities such as San Francisco or Seattle.
When the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that the new coronavirus was causing a global pandemic, on March 11, 2020, COVID-19 had claimed the lives of 36 people in the United States. In the months that followed, the virus spread like wildfire, first to densely populated urban centers such as New York, then to the rest of the country. In June 2020, the death toll exceeded the total US casualties in World War I. By January 2021, it had surpassed the 405,000 American casualties of World War II. One month later, he had surpassed the death toll of World War I, World War 20, and the Vietnam War together, as US President Joe Biden had put it, at more than 500,000.
COVID-19 has left few areas of the Earth intact. Officially, 6.7 million deaths have been reported worldwide. But according to the WHO, the actual number of pandemic victims, directly or indirectly, is probably closer to 15 million.
Some of the images of the pandemic will forever be etched in the minds of Americans: refrigerated trucks outside hospitals overflowing with corpses; intubated patients in sealed intensive care units; exhausted medical staff pandemic wave.
At some point in January 2021, COVID-19 killed an average of more people daily than those killed in the September 11, 2001 attacks.
The virus was sweeping the elderly and people with health problems, but the younger ones did not have much better luck, and more than 1,000 children’s lives were lost. Researchers estimate that 213,000 children lost at least one parent or guardian during the pandemic.
Although raging especially in the big cities, the pandemic also hit rural communities, where health services were substandard as limited.
The blow was disproportionately large in the indigenous and indigenous communities, as well as in prisons.
It decimated entire families, revealed deep inequalities and caused a wave of change that affected almost every dimension of life.
After the threat began to subside after the Omicron wave in the winter, many Americans took off their masks and returned to their offices. In recent weeks, restaurants and bars have been crowded and public attention has been focused on inflation and the economy.
The immunization campaign helped, as tens of millions of Americans were vaccinated by the end of 2020.
At the same time, researchers are continuing to work on new booster doses, as the virus has never stopped mutating.
“It’s not over, by no means,” US immunologist Dr. Anthony Fauci. “We are still experiencing a global pandemic.”
Monitoring the course of the pandemic is difficult, Reuters acknowledges, because of the different way it is recorded by each body. For example, this news agency records the confirmed and possible deaths due to COVID-19, where such data are available. According to other sources, such as Johns Hopkins University, which is based on announcements by local authorities, the death toll has not yet exceeded 1 million (998,699 deaths).
The exact cause of the pandemic may never be known. Some of the people who became infected and died were never tested and are missing from the counts. Others, who had symptoms due to COVID-19 but succumbed to other diseases, such as cancer, are counted.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the US federal public health agency, says there are 1.1 million surplus deaths as of Feb. 1, 2020, most of them due to COVID-19.
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