The number of deaths in the US Covid-19 has exceeded 500,000

At 5 a.m. on July 11, Tara Krebbs received a call at her Phoenix home. Her mother was at the other end, crying hysterically. Tara’s father had woken up unable to breathe and was on his way to the hospital.

Charles Krebbs, 75, began showing symptoms of Covid-19 shortly after Father’s Day in June, first having a fever and then losing his sense of taste and smell. With local hospitals overwhelmed, he had been trying to recover at home, still waiting for the results of a Covid-19 test that had taken weeks to schedule. His results had not yet returned, even when the EMTs rushed him to the emergency room.

Just weeks earlier, Tara had left a Father’s Day gift at her parents ’house with a card that said“ next year will be better ”. It was the last time he saw his father until the night he died, when he was given an hour to personally say goodbye to the ICU. After nearly four weeks in the hospital, he lost the battle against the coronavirus in early August.

Charles Krebbs is one of more than 500,000 Americans who have died from Covid-19, an astonishing toll that comes about a year after the virus was first detected in the United States. according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. And for each of these lost lives, there are children, spouses, siblings and friends who have been left behind.

“I look at old photos of him holding me and you can see how much he loved me,” Tara said of her father, who worked as a real estate agent and appraiser in Maricopa County. He was a music lover and history buff who enjoyed living close to his daughter and family, bringing his grandson to the first day of kindergarten and coaching his Little League teams.

“He was just an affectionate and practical guy who loved his family more than anything,” Krebbs said.

Today’s dark milestone comes in the light of some of the deadliest months of the pandemic. After an increase in the fall and winter cases of Covid-19, 81,000 deaths were recorded in December and 95,000 in January, both far exceeding the April peak of just over 60,000. At the same time, U.S. health officials are competing to pick up the pace of vaccines against Covid-19 across the country.

“Dark Winter”

Although the virus has been with us for over a year, it is difficult to know the scale of the number of deaths.

“As of this week during the dark winter of the COVID-19 pandemic, more than 500,000 Americans have now died from the virus,” President Joe Biden said in a statement on Monday. “On this solemn occasion, we reflect on their loss and on their loved ones left behind. We, as a nation, must remember them so that we can begin to heal ourselves, to unite and find the purpose of one. nation to overcome this pandemic “.

Biden added that he is ordering the U.S. flag to be fired at half-staff for federal reasons until Friday to recognize the more than 500,000 Americans who have died from Covid-19.

Now almost as many Americans have died from Covid-19 as they did in World War I and World War II, combined. The death toll in the U.S. represents a population roughly the size of Atlanta or Kansas City, Missouri.

“Even when half a million people are heard to die, it seems like a very large number, but it’s hard to put that into perspective,” said Cynthia Cox, vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a troubled nonprofit organization. national health. . “It’s hard for people to hear those big numbers and put up with them.”

One of the reasons for this is the nature of how often these deaths have occurred, isolated and far removed from loved ones.

“What has made Covid different from other mass casualty events is the lack of video or personal connection at the time of death,” Cox said. “Covid’s rooms are so sealed for security reasons that we don’t have news cameras to show us how it really is. We hear a lot of numbers, but we don’t have that personal connection unless we know someone.”

David Kessler, a Los Angeles-based expert and author who has led an online support group for those who have lost someone against Covid, said 500,000 deaths are a number “that the mind does not want to understand.”

“Such a number makes the world dangerous and we prefer not to live in a dangerous world,” he said.

Looking for a benchmark, Kessler compared Covid’s death toll to the two Boeing 737 Max planes in 2018 and 2019 that killed a total of 346 people.

“Think about how many 737 highs went down, how much news we had and the images we had,” he said. “Don’t you realize that 500,000 people equate to almost 3,000 planes taking off. Eight would have gone down yesterday. Can you imagine if eight planes crashed every day?”

One of the leading causes of death in the US

The death toll from Covid-19 firmly places the disease among the leading causes of mortality in the United States. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, heart disease and cancer alone killed more than 500,000 people in a year in 2019, the most recent annual figures available. When the daily death toll peaked in January, Cox found in a Kaiser Family Foundation analysis that Covid killed more people a day than any other cause.

Covid-19, however, is a single disease and not a group of diseases that make up the broader categories of cause of death in the CDC, such as heart disease and cancer. Covid-19 figures are even stronger compared to other specific diseases such as lung cancer, which killed 140,000 Americans in 2019, Alzheimer’s disease, which killed 121,000, or breast cancer, which killed 43,000.

Break down that way, Cox said, Covid’s death toll “far exceeds any other disease.”

The effect of the disease is so blatant that, during the first half of 2020, life expectancy in the United States dropped by a year, a staggering drop, according to the latest CDC analysis.

The United States has been one of the countries most affected by the coronavirus, with more deaths than anywhere else in the world. According to an analysis by Johns Hopkins University, when adjusted for population, the United States only records per capita deaths in the United Kingdom, the Czech Republic, Italy, and Portugal.

“It meant a lot to a lot of people”

Isabelle Odette Papadimitriou was a respiratory therapist in Dallas, who spent the spring and summer caring for Covid patients at the hospital where she worked. In late June, she caught the virus herself and died shortly afterwards on July 4, her favorite vacation. He was 64 years old.

Her daughter, Fiana Tulip, remembers her mother as a person who was “strong as an ox” and who had achieved this through countless flu outbreaks during her 30-year career. A fan of the British royal family who treated her two dogs “like little humans,” Tulip said she was the kind of mother who sent packages to her daughter Amazon as soon as she thought she needed something. After she died, Tulip received a pair of pink ruffle shoes that Papadimitriou had sent to Tulip’s daughter, her first grandson.

During the summer, Tulip received calls from her mother’s former classmates and friends, ranging from an employee at the local Papadimitriou dog daycare to the owner of a storage unit she rented in Texas. .

“People who loved my mom had just come out,” Tulip said. “It meant a lot to a lot of people.”

The pandemic is not over yet

Coronavirus cases in the US have dropped in recent weeks and the rate of reported deaths is also slowing. According to data from Johns Hopkins University, the country records just under 1,900 deaths from Covid-19 a day, based on a weekly average, compared to 3,300 a day in mid-January.

However, the death toll will continue to rise. Projections from the University of Washington Institute of Health Metrics and Assessment show a range of 571,000 to 616,000 deaths from Covid-19 in total in the U.S. through June 1, according to various scenarios.

Fauci, the country’s leading infectious disease expert, warned Americans on Sunday to avoid feeling complacent about Covid-19 despite declining numbers of cases, saying “the baseline of daily infections is still very, very high. “

The CDC has also identified it at least three strains of mutant viruses in the U.S., some of which have been shown to be more transmissible than the dominant strain, although experts have said they expect current vaccines they provide some protection against these variants.

To date, approximately 44 million people, approximately 13% of the population, have received at least one shot Pfizer or Moderna two-shot vaccines, and Biden suggested during a CNN town hall last week that the country could return to a certain appearance of normalcy by Christmas.

But for those who have lost a loved one to Covid-19, Kessler, the mourning expert, said things will not be the same.

“If you’re talking about family members, we don’t recover from the loss,” he said. “We have to learn to live with loss.”