The number of lives lost could fill the Madison Square Garden in New York City almost 20 times and is roughly equivalent to the population of Tampa, Florida, or Tulsa, Oklahoma.
The 400,000 lives lost are more deaths than the number of American soldiers who died in battle during World War I, World War II and the Vietnam War combined, shows an analysis of data compiled by the Department of Veterans Affairs.
The milestone comes just over a month after the country exceeded 300,000 confirmed deaths from COVID-19 on December 14, and just 17 days since the U.S. reached 350,000 reported deaths on January 2, according to data collected by Johns University Hopkins.
“That the US has reached the grotesque 400,000 mark [COVID-19] deaths must stop us on our way. We must demand from our leaders an explanation of why they allowed, in the last month alone, 100,000 Americans to die without taking measures to prevent this terrible loss of life, ”said Jennifer Nuzzo, public health researcher at Johns Hopkins, to ABC Notícias.
Globally, the virus has claimed more than 2 million lives. The United States accounts for approximately 19.5% of COVID-19-related deaths in the world – about 188,000 deaths reported ahead of the second most affected country, Brazil. The United States represents just over 4% of the global population.
Experts had been warning for months that if Americans did not take the necessary safety precautions to protect themselves and others during the winter – and in particular, on vacation – many people would suffer the consequences.
During a press conference by the White House Task Force on March 29, President Donald Trump said that if the US managed to keep the death toll between 100,000 and 200,000 lives lost, it would mean that the government had “done a lot of work good”.
However, on Labor Day, 189,000 Americans were already dead, and in October, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s top disease expert, warned that the death toll could rise dramatically.
“The models tell us that if we don’t do what we need in the fall and winter, we could have 300,000 to 400,000 deaths from COVID-19,” said Fauci during a virtual event with American University in Washington, DC
The totals far surpassed the initial task force estimates, and now the next Biden government is warning that the “dark winter” is not over yet. Dr. Rochelle Walensky, appointed by Biden to serve as the next director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told CBS’s “Face the Nation” program on Sunday that, in mid-February, “we expect half a million deaths in this country ”of COVID-19.
“We still haven’t seen the ramifications of what happened to vacation travel, vacation meetings, in terms of high rates of hospitalizations and deaths after that,” added Walensky.
The US currently averages just under 3,300 new coronavirus-related deaths per day, and at the beginning of the month, there were more than 53,000 COVID-19-related deaths recorded – that is, approximately 1 American death reported every 30 seconds.
“We cannot allow ourselves to be numb by this moral and leadership failure. We must redouble efforts to prevent the virus from spreading, ”said Nuzzo.
The milestone also comes just days before the one-year anniversary of the country’s first confirmed COVID-19 case, which was reported on January 21, 2020, according to the CDC.
US cases now total 24 million, but the seven-day national average of daily cases is falling from the record set at the beginning of last week – an average of approximately 207,000 new confirmed cases per day.
This is a drop from the record set last Monday, although the country has not seen a day with less than 100,000 cases recorded in 11 weeks.
Hospitalizations have also dropped nationally, with just under 124,000 patients currently hospitalized across the country, from 132,000 earlier this week.
The surprising numbers of COVID-19 also follow the news of a new report from the CDC, which warned that the United Kingdom variant could worsen the pandemic in the United States, without “universal and increased compliance” with the use of masks and social detachment . The new variant, which is believed to be more contagious than previous strains, was discovered in at least 20 states, according to a count by ABC News.
The number of cases for this variant is likely to “double every week,” according to Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. “In about five weeks, this will start to take over,” said Gottlieb during an interview with CBS’s “Face the Nation” program.
And as the death toll continues to rise, state officials continue to cry out to vaccinate their residents, in a desperate effort to decrease the death rate.
“Each dose of vaccine in a tank instead of on an arm could mean another death that could have been prevented,” concluded Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar last week.