The Covid-19 death toll in the US has exceeded 500,000

At 5 am on July 11, Tara Krebbs received a call at her home in Phoenix. His mother was on the other side, crying hysterically. Tara’s father woke up unable to breathe and was on his way to the hospital.

Charles Krebbs, 75, started showing symptoms of Covid-19 shortly after Father’s Day in June, first with a fever and then losing his taste and smell. With local hospitals overloaded, he was trying to recover at home, still waiting for the results of a Covid-19 test that took weeks to schedule. His results were not yet back – even when paramedics rushed him to the emergency room.

A few 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 she would see her father until the night he died, when she had an hour to say goodbye in person to the ICU. After nearly four weeks in the hospital, he lost his battle with the coronavirus in early August.

Charles Krebbs is one of more than 500,000 Americans who died from Covid-19, an impressive number that occurs about a year after the virus was first detected in the U.S., according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. And for each of those lost lives, there are children, spouses, brothers and friends who are left behind.

“I see old pictures of him holding me and you can see how much he loved me,” Tara said about her father, who worked as a realtor and appraiser in Maricopa County. He was a music lover and history fan who enjoyed living close to his daughter and her family, taking his grandson to the first day of kindergarten and training his children’s league teams.

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

Today’s gloomy milestone follows some of the deadliest months of the pandemic. After an autumn and winter spike in Covid-19 cases, there were 81,000 reported deaths in December and 95,000 in January, both exceeding the April peak of just over 60,000. At the same time, US health officials are rushing to increase the pace of Covid-19 vaccinations all over the country.

‘Dark winter’

Although the virus has been with us for over a year, the scale of the death toll is difficult to understand.

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

Biden added that he is ordering the American flag to be flown at half-mast in federal territory by Friday to recognize the more than 500,000 Americans who died from Covid-19.

Almost as many Americans have died of Covid-19 as have been killed in the First and Second World War combined. The death toll in the US represents a population roughly the size of Atlanta or Kansas City, Missouri.

“Even when you hear about half a million people dying, it seems like a very large number, but it’s hard to put it in perspective,” said Cynthia Cox, vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit organization focused on national issues. of health . “It is difficult for people to hear these big numbers and put faces on them.”

One reason for this is the nature of how these deaths often occurred, isolated and away from loved ones.

“What was different about Covid from other events with mass casualties is the lack of video or personal connection at the time of death,” said Cox. “Covid wards are so isolated for security reasons that we don’t have news cameras for us show you what it really looks like. We hear a lot of big numbers, but we don’t have that personal connection unless we know someone. “

David Kessler, a Los Angeles-based grieving expert and author who runs an online support group for those who lost someone to Covid, said 500,000 deaths is a figure “that the mind doesn’t want to understand”.

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

In search of a benchmark, Kessler compared the death toll from Covid to the two Boeing 737 Max plane crashes in 2018 and 2019, which killed a total of 346 people.

“Think about how many 737 Maxes fell, how much news we had and the visuals we had,” he said. “You don’t realize that 500,000 people is the equivalent of almost 3,000 planes crashing. Eight would have crashed yesterday. Can you imagine if eight planes crashed every day?”

One of the leading causes of death in the USA

Covid-19’s death toll puts the disease firmly among the leading causes of death in the United States. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, only heart disease and cancer killed more than 500,000 people in one year in 2019, the most recent annual figures available. When the number of daily deaths peaked in January, Cox found in an analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation that Covid was killing more people a day than any other cause.

Covid-19, however, is a unique disease, not a group of diseases that make up the broader categories of CDC causes of death, such as heart disease and cancer. Covid-19’s figures are even sharper 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.

Divided in this way, Cox said, the death toll in Covid “really far exceeds any other isolated disease.”

The effect of the disease is so far-reaching that, in the first half of 2020, life expectancy in the United States decreased by one year – an impressive drop, according to the CDC’s latest analysis.

The United States is one of the countries most affected by the coronavirus, with more reported deaths than anywhere else in the world. When adjusting for population, the United States is second only to the United Kingdom, the Czech Republic, Italy and Portugal in deaths per capita, according to an analysis by Johns Hopkins University.

‘She meant a lot to many people’

Isabelle Odette Papadimitriou was a respiratory therapist in Dallas, who spent spring and summer taking care of Covid patients at the hospital where she worked. In late June, she contracted the virus herself and died shortly after, on July 4, her favorite holiday. She was 64 years old.

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

During the summer, Tulip received calls from her mother’s former colleagues and friends, ranging from an employee at the local Papadimitriou dog day care center to the owner of a warehouse she rented in Texas.

“People who loved my mom were just leaving,” said Tulip. “It meant a lot to many people.”

The pandemic is not over yet

Coronavirus cases in the United States have plummeted in recent weeks, and the rate of reported deaths is also slowing. The country is seeing just under 1,900 deaths from Covid-19 a day, based on a weekly average, compared to more than 3,300 deaths per day in mid-January, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

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 total Covid-19 deaths in the United States through June 1, based on various scenarios.

Fauci, the country’s leading infectious disease specialist, warned Americans on Sunday to avoid a sense of complacency at Covid-19, despite the drop in the number of cases, saying that “the base of daily infections is still very, very high. “

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

So far, about 44 million people, about 13% of the population, have received at least one injection of two-dose vaccines from Pfizer or Moderna, and Biden suggested during a meeting at CNN city hall last week that the country could return to some appearance of normalcy by Christmas.

But for those who lost a loved one to Covid-19, Kessler, the grieving 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 the loss.”