(Newser)
– In late December, the United States reached the milestone of 1,000 deaths from COVID per million people, meaning the pandemic had killed one in a thousand Americans. The country reached the next milestone on Tuesday, and COVID claimed one in 500 since the first infection reported earlier last year, CNN reports. The pandemic has killed nearly 664,000 Americans, according to Johns Hopkins University, a higher total than any other nation, although some, including Peru, Brazil and Hungary, have higher mortality rates.
With the most infectious delta variant now the dominant strain, the United States now averages more than 150,000 new infections reported each day and about 1,800 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins. “We’re kind of where we predicted we’d be with a totally uncontrolled spread of the infection,” explains Jeffrey D. Klausner, clinical professor of medicine, population, and public health sciences at the Keck School of Medicine at Southern University. of California. Washington Post.
The figure of one in 500 does not reflect the huge differences in the number of deaths by COVID between age groups, races and regions, Publication reports. Among people over the age of 85, who account for about a quarter of deaths from COVID, the virus has killed one in 35 years. 64, compared with one in 480 blacks and one in 1,300 whites in the same age group. In Mississippi and New Jersey, the pandemic has killed one in 330 residents, while in Vermont, which has the highest vaccination rate in the country, the rate is one in 2,100. (Read more coronavirus stories.)