The United States, the country officially hit hardest by the new global coronavirus pandemic, surpassed the tragic milestone of 800,000 deaths from COVID-19 on Tuesday, according to the Johns Hopkins University census.
The death toll (exactly 800,266 as of 01:22 Greek time) is higher than the population of entire US states, such as North Dakota or Alaska.
Reuters news agency, citing its own data, reported earlier this week that the milestone was exceeded on Sunday.
More than half of the deaths, about 450,000, occurred in 2021, although there have been effective vaccines since December 2020, which became widely available in the spring of 2021 to the general population.
The United States currently has an average of 1,150 deaths per day from complications of COVID-19 per day, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the state’s main public health agency.
The vast majority of people who succumbed this year were unvaccinated.
About 72% of the US population has received at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine, a lower rate than several other countries, such as France.
“As we cross the symbolic threshold of 800,000 Americans who died because of COVID-19, we remember each one of them, the lives they lived, we pray for theirs,” President Joe Biden said in a statement.
“I know what it is like to have an empty chair at the kitchen table, especially during the holidays, and my heart goes out to every family that experiences this pain,” he added.
Congressional leaders observed a minute’s silence Tuesday night to pay tribute to the lives lost.
“We remember the 800,000 loved ones who did not make it this far: a father, a grandfather, a mother, a grandmother, a friend, a loved one in the neighborhood,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Sumer told a news conference. made public. “We all know someone who got this disease.”
The US has overcome this macabre milestone while being hit by the so-called fifth wave of the pandemic, which is attributed – like the previous one – to the Delta variant of the virus.
However, experts are now worried about the Omicron variant, which has begun to spread in the country, although it is currently only 3% of new infections, which have now exceeded 50.2 million in total.
Omicron is spreading at an unprecedented rate around the world, the World Health Organization warned yesterday.
The United States is mourning the highest death toll from the global pandemic, according to official government figures, followed by Brazil, India, Mexico and Russia.
Globally, the death toll from the new coronavirus pandemic has reached 5.3 million dead by the end of 2019, according to the French Agency’s report, based on government announcements, until yesterday. However, according to the World Health Organization, the death toll is likely to double to triple in reality.
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