What was once unthinkable is now a reality.
One million Americans have already died of the coronavirus, according to a statement released Thursday by President Joe Biden, marking a long-dangerous cornerstone of an incomprehensible tragedy.
“Today marks a tragic milestone: one million American lives lost to COVID-19. One million empty chairs around the dinner table. Everyone is an irreplaceable loss. Everyone leaves behind a family, a community and a nation forever changed by this pandemic. Jill and I are praying for each one of them, “Biden said in a statement.” As a nation, we must not be numb with such grief. To heal, we must remember. “
The president intends to order flags to be lowered in half in memory.
For the past two years, the deadly virus has held the nation firmly in its paws, flooding wave after wave of the virus with only relatively short pauses in between.
“This unthinkable tragedy will forever appear in history textbooks,” said Dr. John Braunstein. epidemiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital and contributor to ABC News.
The loss of 1 million lives is a reality that is still difficult for many to understand and accept. In some respects, the death toll remains hidden from view.
A funeral director transported the body of a 54-year-old woman who died of COVID-19 at her home on September 13, 2021 in Houston.
Experts said the statistics, however massive, did not fully reflect the scale of the human tragedy.
“It’s one thing to talk about numbers, but then to realize that each of those numbers represents grandparents, a husband or someone with their own unique story that we’ve lost. You already know over a million of these stories in this country, in this country alone – it really is a tragedy and a tragedy, in many ways, on an unprecedented scale, “said Dr. David Daudi, an epidemiologist on infectious diseases at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. he told ABC News.
But the impact of deaths goes far beyond the total number of deaths. An analysis published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences estimates that 9 million family members – mothers, fathers, grandparents, siblings and children – may mourn the loss of a loved one killed by the virus.
“It’s a very sad and tragic landmark to get to the point of a million deaths in this truly extraordinary experience we’ve all been through for the last two and a half years,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert. told Boston Public Radio on GBH News. “We hope that the huge number of this issue will encourage us to do everything possible to make sure that we do not have such bad weather in the coming months and years.
Make sense of numbers
The staggering number of deaths due to COVID-19 is now equivalent to the population of San Jose, California – the tenth largest city in the United States
“If you tell people that an American city has been wiped off the face of the earth, people will be shocked and horrified. But because it was kind of a gradual burnout over two years, we were so used to listening to the headlines and so tired of dealing with a pandemic. That sense of horror and devastation is lost, “Daudi said.
COVID-19 is the third leading cause of death in the United States in 2021, after heart disease and cancer, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The number of Americans lost to COVID-19 also continues to exceed the number of flu deaths. Between October 1, 2021 and April 30, 2022, the CDC estimated that there were approximately 3,600 to 10,000 influenza deaths. At the same time, more than 280,000 Americans have died from COVID-19.
The country’s racial and ethnic minorities also face an increased risk of a positive test requiring hospitalization and death from COVID-19. According to age- and population-adjusted federal data, the probability of death from COVID-19 for blacks, Asians, Hispanics, and Indians is one to two times higher than that of whites.
Many experts believe that the current number of deaths from COVID-19 may now be significantly reduced due to inconsistent reporting by states and localities and the exclusion of over-deaths, a measure of how many lives have been lost beyond what would be expected. if the pandemic had not happened.
A recent report by the World Health Organization also found that estimates worldwide show that there are nearly 15 million deaths related to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021 – more than twice the official global number of deaths. of the 6.2 million confirmed virus-related deaths.
“I really don’t think people understand.”
It has been more than two years since Pamela Addison lost her husband Martin, a health worker, to COVID-19 in the early days of the April 2020 pandemic, but the grief is still fierce.
“The day he died, I was stunned and shocked and thrown into this new life,” Addison said. “I know that [my two young kids] they would miss a lifetime of moments with their father. “
After the loss of her husband, the 38-year-old New Jersey teacher turned out to be the single mother of the couple’s two young children, Elsie, then 2 years old, and Graham, then 5 months old, overnight.
Pamela Addison poses for a photo with her late husband Martin Addison and their two children, Elsie and Graham, in an undated photo.
Martin, a speech therapist at St. Joseph’s University Medical Center in Patterson, New Jersey, was just 44 when he contracted the virus in late March 2020. Within weeks, Martin was hospitalized on a ventilator and despite numerous interventions and efforts, Martin succumbed to the virus a little over a month after developing his first symptoms.
“Knowing I wasn’t there when my husband died, I never saw him again after he left that door – it’s something I’ll carry with me forever,” Addison said. “I said goodbye to FaceTime and I didn’t even know it would be the last time I loved him… I couldn’t do a funeral for my husband and I really don’t feel like people understand how hard it is to grieve.”
The loss has deeply affected the couple’s two young children, who still often talk about their father and their longing to embrace them.
“I felt so unprepared to do it [my daughter’s] the pain goes away, “Addison said.
A few months after her husband’s death, in an attempt to find a community of others who might experience the same grief as her, Addison founded the young widows and widows of COVID-19 on Facebook, which now includes hundreds of members.
A nurse at Three Rivers Asante Medical Center is waiting for her next COVID-19 case to be brought from the emergency department shortly after a deceased patient was removed from the same intensive care unit on September 9, 2021 in Grants Pass, Ore.
“When I lost Martin, it was a feeling of loneliness,” Addison explained. “Knowing that other people have experienced the same kind of inability to be there with their loved one… gives me some comfort in knowing that I’m not alone… there are so many people grieving the loss of COVID-19.”
“Countless results that would not lead to a million deaths”
In the early days of the pandemic, former President Donald Trump predicted that the death toll from COVID-19 in the United States would be “significantly” lower than initially estimated.
“The minimum number was 100,000 lives, and I think we’ll be well below that number … So we’ll see what it will be in the end, but we seem to be targeting a number well below 100,000,” Trump said in April. 2020
Similarly, at the start of the pandemic, Dr. Fauci himself, in his most pessimistic scenario, did not foresee the possibility that the number of Americans killed by the virus could end up being so staggeringly high, CNN was told in late March 2020. that preparing 1 million to 2 million Americans to die from coronavirus is “almost certainly off schedule.”
“It’s not impossible now, but it’s very, very unlikely,” Fauci said.
Risk of exposure to COVID-19 in the United States
The uncertainty of the federal response in the early days of the pandemic has come under repeated scrutiny by public health experts, who say more needs to be done to keep the virus at bay.
“To imagine where we were a little over two years ago, we lacked the clarity, the preparation and the real political will to respond properly to a viral threat that would bring the world to its knees,” Braunstein said.
The bodies were moved to a refrigerated truck that serves as a temporary morgue at Wyckoff Hospital in the Brooklyn area on April 6, 2020, in New York City.
On average, more than 300 Americans still die from COVID-19 every day
Although mortality from COVID-19 is significantly lower than in the winter of 2021, when more than an average of 3,400 Americans died from the virus each day, the death toll is still above 300 per day, according to federal data.
“We would not tolerate this type of burden or mortality from preventable disease in any other situation, and we should not tolerate this for COVID-19 – just because we have been doing it for a long time,” Daudi said.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, older Americans have largely borne the brunt of COVID-19 deaths, even though they have a higher vaccination rate than the general population. Overall, people over the age of 65 account for more than three-quarters of all virus-related deaths in the United States, according to federal data.
More than 90% of the elderly have been fully vaccinated, and about two-thirds have received their first booster vaccine. However, despite high vaccination rates in older populations, in recent months, during the omicron jump, 73% of deaths were among those aged 65 and over.
Mortality from COVID-19 in the United States per 100,000
There is also a growing death rate among those vaccinated, according to an analysis by ABC News of the federal …
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