For weeks after Cindy Pollock began planting small flags in her garden (one for each of the more than 1,800 Idahoans killed by COVID-19), the toll was mostly a number. Until two women he had never met rang his weeping bell, looking for a place to mourn the husband and father they had just lost.
Pollock then learned that his tribute, however sincere, would never begin to convey the pain of a pandemic that has now claimed nearly 500,000 lives in the United States.
“I just wanted to hug them,” he said. “Because that was all I could do.”
After a year that has darkened the doors of the United States, the pandemic is about to surpass a milestone that once seemed unimaginable, a reminder of the spread of the virus in every corner of the country and communities of all sizes and makeup .
“It’s hard for me to imagine an American who doesn’t know someone who has died or who has a family member who has died,” said Ali Mokdad, a professor of health metrics at the University of Washington in Seattle. “We really didn’t quite understand how bad, how devastating it is for all of us.”
Experts warn that more than 100,000 deaths are likely to occur in the coming months, despite a massive vaccination campaign. Meanwhile, the nation’s trauma continues to build up in an unprecedented way in recent American life, said Donna Schuurman of the Dougy Center for Grieving Children & Families in Portland, Oregon.
In other times of epic loss, such as the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Americans have come together to face the crisis and comfort the survivors. But this time, the nation is deeply divided. An impressive number of families face death, serious illness, and economic hardship. And many are left to deal in isolation, unable to even hold funerals.
“In a way, we are all in pain,” said Schuurman, who has advised the families of the dead in terrorist attacks, natural disasters and school shootings.
In recent weeks, virus deaths have dropped from more than 4,000 reported some days in January to an average of less than 1,900 a day.
Still, at nearly half a million, the toll recorded by Johns Hopkins University is already higher than the population of Miami or Kansas City, Missouri. It is roughly equal to the number of Americans killed in World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War combined. It’s similar to 9/11 every day for almost six months.
The toll, which accounts for 1 in 5 deaths reported worldwide, has far exceeded initial projections, which assumed the federal and state governments would order a full and sustained response and that Americans heeded the warnings.
Instead, the push to reopen the economy last spring and the refusal of many to maintain social distancing and wear masks was fueled.
The numbers alone do not come close to capturing lovelessness.
“I never doubted that he would not succeed. … I believed in him and in my faith, ”said Nancy Espinoza, whose husband, Antonio, was hospitalized with COVID-19 last month.
The couple from Riverside County, California, had been together since high school. They pursued parallel nursing careers and formed a family. Then, on January 25, Nancy was called to Antonio’s bed just before her last heartbeat. He was 36 and left a 3-year-old son behind.
“It simply came to our notice then. And tomorrow it could be anyone, ”Nancy Espinoza said.
As of late last fall, 54% of Americans reported knowing someone who had died of COVID-19 or had been hospitalized with it, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center. Mourning was even more widespread among black Americans, Hispanics, and other minorities.
Deaths have almost doubled since then, with the scourge spread far beyond the northeast and northwest metropolitan areas and hit the virus last spring.
In some places, the severity of the threat slowly subsided.
When a beloved professor at a community university in Petoskey, Michigan, died last spring, residents lamented, but many continued to doubt the seriousness of the threat, Mayor John Murphy said. That changed over the summer after a local family organized a party in a barn. Of the 50 attendees, 33 became infected. Three died, he said.
“I think from a distance people felt like ‘this isn’t going to get me,'” Murphy said. “But over time, that attitude has totally changed from ‘I don’t. It’s not our area. I’m not old enough. , as far as it became the real business “.
For Anthony Hernandez, whose Emmerson-Bartlett Memorial Chapel in Redlands, California, has been overwhelmed handling the burial of COVID-19 victims, the most difficult conversations have been the ones that have had no answers as he tried to console mothers, fathers and children who lost loved ones.
His chapel, which organizes 25 to 30 services in an ordinary month, managed 80 in January. He had to explain to some families that they would have to wait weeks for a funeral.
“At one point, we had all the bars, all the toilets, all the embalming tables there was someone,” he said.
In Boise, Idaho, Pollock started the memorial in his garden last fall to counter what he saw as a widespread denial of the threat. When deaths rose in December, he was planting 25 to 30 new flags at a time. But their frustration has been alleviated somewhat by those who linger or stop to respect or cry.
“I think that’s part of what I wanted, for people to talk,” he said, “not just like,‘ Look how many flags there are in the garden compared to last month, ’but trying to help people who have lost loved ones talk to other people “.
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Associated Press video journalist Eugene Garcia contributed to this story.