For weeks, after Cindy Pollock started planting flags in her backyard – one for each of the more than 1,800 Idahoans killed by COVID-19 – the toll was mostly a number. Until two women she never met rang the bell in tears, looking for a place to mourn the husband and father they had just lost.
So Pollock knew that his tribute, however sincere it was, would never begin to transmit the pain of a pandemic that has already claimed 500,000 lives in the USA and counting.
“I just wanted to hug you,” she said. “Because that was all I could do.”
After a year that darkened the doors of the United States, the pandemic surpassed a milestone on Monday that previously seemed unimaginable, a clear confirmation of the virus’s reach in all corners of the country and communities of all sizes and makeup.
“It is very difficult for me to imagine an American who does not know someone who has died or has a family member who has died,” said Ali Mokdad, professor of health metrics at the University of Washington in Seattle. “We still don’t fully understand how bad and devastating it is for all of us.”
Experts warn that about 90,000 more deaths are likely in the coming months, despite a massive campaign to vaccinate people. Meanwhile, the nation’s trauma continues to accumulate in an unparalleled way in recent American life, said Donna Schuurman, of the Dougy Center for Children and Families in Mourning in Portland, Oregon.
In other moments of epic loss, such as the September 11 terrorist attacks, the Americans came together to face the crisis and comfort the survivors. But this time, the nation is deeply divided. An impressive number of families are dealing with deaths, serious illnesses and financial difficulties. And many are left alone, unable even to hold funerals.
“In a way, we are all in mourning,” said Schuurman, who advised the families of people killed in terrorist attacks, natural disasters and school shootings.
In the past few weeks, viruses deaths dropped from more than 4,000 reported in some days in January to an average of less than 1,900 per day.
Still, at half a million, the toll recorded by Johns Hopkins University is already greater than the population of Miami or Kansas City, Missouri. It is almost equal to the number of Americans killed in World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War combined. It is similar to 9/11 every day for almost six months.
“The people we lost were extraordinary,” President Joe Biden he said Monday, asking Americans to remember the individual lives claimed by the virus, rather than being numb by the enormity of the number of victims.
“As simple as that,” he said, “many of them took their last breath alone in America.”
The number of deaths, responsible for 1 in 5 reported deaths worldwide, far exceeded initial projections, which assumed that the federal and state governments would organize a comprehensive and sustained response and individual Americans would heed the warnings.
Instead, an impulse to reopen the economy last spring and the refusal of many to maintain social distance and wear masks fueled the spread.
The numbers alone don’t come close to capturing the broken heart.
“I never doubted that he wouldn’t survive. … I really 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 followed parallel nursing careers and started a family. Then, on January 25, Nancy was called to Antonio’s bedside just before her heart beat for the last time. He was 36 and left a 3 year old son.
“Today is us. And tomorrow it can be anyone, ”said Nancy Espinoza.
At the end of last fall, 54% of Americans reported meeting someone who died of COVID-19 or was hospitalized with him, 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 spreading far beyond the metropolitan areas of the Northeast and Northwest hit by the virus last spring and the cities of the Sun Belt were hit hard last summer.
In some places, the seriousness of the threat took time to be noticed.
When a beloved professor at a community college in Petoskey, Michigan, died last spring, residents regretted it, but many remained uncertain about the seriousness of the threat, Mayor John Murphy said. That changed in the summer, after a local family threw a party in a barn. Of the 50 who attended, 33 were infected. Three died, he said.
“I think that at a distance people were like, ‘This isn’t going to get me,'” said Murphy. “But over time, the attitude has completely changed from ‘not me. It is not our area. I’m not old enough ‘where it became a real business. “
For Anthony Hernandez, whose Emmerson-Bartlett Memorial Chapel in Redlands, California, was overwhelmed in dealing with the burial of the victims of COVID-19, the most difficult conversations were those with no answers, as he sought to console mothers, fathers and children who had lost their loved ones.
Its chapel, which organizes 25 to 30 services in a normal month, attended 80 in January. He had to explain to some families that they would have to wait weeks for the funeral.
“At one point, we had someone on each stretcher, each dressing table, each embalming table,” he said.
In Boise, Idaho, Pollock started the memorial in his backyard last fall to contain what he saw as a general denial of the threat. When the deaths increased in December, she was planting 25 to 30 new flags at a time. But his frustration was alleviated in some way by those who slow down or stop to pay tribute or regret.
“I think this is part of what I wanted, to get people to talk,” she said, “not just like, ‘Look how many flags are in the yard today compared to last month’, but trying to help people who have loved ones lost people talk to other people. “
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Associated Press video journalist Eugene Garcia contributed to this story.