COVID-19 deaths in the United States exceeded 500,000 on Monday, the last deserted season in a vast landscape of losses.
The toll is difficult to imagine. It is as if everyone in a city the size of Atlanta or Sacramento has simply disappeared. The number is greater than the combined deaths of the United States on the battlefield in world wars and in Vietnam. Last month, based on the average 24-hour fatality count, it was as if the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks had happened every day.
“You see that number, not just another number,” said Bettina Gonzales, 39, whose 61-year-old father David Gonzales, a popular football and basketball coach in Harlingen, Texas, died in August. “It is a great tragedy behind this number.”
COVID-19 deaths registered in the United States account for about a fifth of the almost 2.5 million fatalities known worldwide from the disease, twice as many as in Brazil, the next most affected country. California alone is responsible for nearly 50,000 deaths, about 10% of the country’s total. Almost 20,000 of them were in Los Angeles County, where about one in 500 people died.
President Biden, marking the sad milestone on Monday night, urged the nation to honor the dead by observing public health measures to help end the pandemic.
“The people we lost were extraordinary. They spanned generations. Born in America, immigrated to America. But even so, many of them took their last breath alone in America, ”he said in comments at the White House. “We have to resist becoming insensitive to sadness. We have to resist seeing each life as a statistic. “
Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, along with their spouses, remained silent amid 500 candles – to commemorate 500,000 dead – placed along the South Portico steps. The Navy band sang “Amazing Grace”.
Poets and philosophers – and social science researchers – know that a huge number of deaths can become abstractions. For America as a whole, it can be so; for those touched by individual pain, it is the opposite.
People who have lost loved ones or suffered lasting physical damage because of an episode of COVID-19 sometimes speak of feeling trapped on the other side of a great chasm, alienated from countrymen who wonder when they will be able to return to the bars and baseball games.
Among millions of mourners, some are still unable to believe that a loved one who has survived so many other things has been taken away.
Ralph Hakman, a Holocaust survivor, was vigorous in his 90s. But in the early days of the pandemic, he suddenly fell ill and died on March 22, twelve days after his 95th birthday.º birthday.
“If it weren’t for COVID, I really believe he would have lived over 100,” said his 89-year-old widow, Barbara Zerulik, who fell ill at the same time as Hakman and was diagnosed with COVID-19. Her husband was not tested for the virus, but doctors believe he killed him.
Born in Poland to an Orthodox Jewish family, Hakman survived three years in Auschwitz before immigrating to the United States. He raised two children in Beverly Hills with his first wife, also a Holocaust survivor.
“He survived so much brutal hatred and violence when he was young – he was so strong,” said Zerulik, who spent months in hospital and rehabilitation care before moving to Jacksonville, Florida, to live with his daughter. “So that disease brought him down.”
Public figures have advanced in history to find parallels to these soul-testing times. Biden’s chief medical advisor, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said on Sunday in a television interview that half a million deaths are like nothing “that we’ve been through in the last 102 years since the 1918 flu pandemic.” Deaths in the United States were then cataclysmic at 675,000, though decreased by a worldwide number of 50 million.
Last year, the pandemic left few American lives unharmed. All the ways in which society is organized – school and work, economics and governance, friendship and family life, love and romance – have changed, in some cases irrevocably.
Ohio kindergarten teacher Holly Maxwell used to love hugging her little students when they needed comfort. Her school outside Uniontown has been giving face-to-face classes all year round, but she has only a dozen students, instead of the usual 22, and a six foot social distance is carefully observed.
That means no clusters of 5-year-olds around Maxwell’s rocking chair for the time of history, no playing with building blocks and puzzles.
“The socio-emotional effects of this will be huge for this age group,” said Maxwell, 48, a mother of two who has been teaching for 22 years. “They should be learning to be friends – they want to play together. It hurts my heart. “
Contagion has painfully altered end-of-life farewells and mourning rituals. While David Gonzales, the Texas technician, died after a month on a respirator, nurses called his daughter, Bettina, from her hospital room at FaceTime. In the confusion, the phone in his room was facing the wall and Bettina’s screen went blank.
“I could hear chest compressions, air running through his body,” she recalled. “At the end of the day, I heard the flatline.”
Caring for the dead – so many, many dead – has been an extraordinary burden and a sacred duty. That duty is close to home for Michael Fowler, the 62-year-old coroner from Dougherty County, in rural southwest Georgia.
In his close-knit, mostly black community, he took care of the bodies of neighbors and relatives, zipping the bag over a familiar face.
“When so many of the dead are your friends and coworkers, it takes its toll,” he said.
Last year, he pronounced 267 COVID-related deaths, taking calls in the middle of the night, taking pictures, notifying relatives. Sometimes families were so devastated by the disease that there was no one to give instructions on which undertaker to use.
“It was just overwhelming,” he said. “A husband would be in the hospital on a respirator after his wife died.”
During the deadliest month – April, which saw 86 deaths of COVID-19 in the county – the local morgue ran out of space and the Federal Emergency Management Agency brought refrigerated 18-wheelers to store the bodies.
Fowler has lost so much weight that he needs to fasten his pants. He hasn’t taken a vacation in months. He usually goes to the office at night to fill out the paperwork, losing sleep. But his last assignment gave him a glimpse of hope: to notify county residents where they can be vaccinated.
“I can see the light now,” he said. “With the vaccine and all the care everyone is taking, things are going to get much better.”
This is not the darkest hour of the pandemic; it may have already passed. New cases in the United States have been falling for five weeks; vaccine launch, despite delays and shortages, is tending to success – although it is also a race against new deadly variants that are circulating in the United States and around the world.
Over the past year, the pandemic has revealed the shocking social disparities in the United States, which have been around all the time, but which have been totally reinforced by the crisis.
Blacks and Latinos are much more likely to suffer devastating medical consequences. Economic inequalities abound, with wealthier working Americans at home facing the outbreak relatively easily, even as unemployment soared to levels never seen in decades, leaving millions of American families unable to pay for necessities like housing and food.
At the same time, there was a gloomy resemblance to the threat: COVID-19 devastated crowded urban neighborhoods, as well as lonely prairie towns, jumping inexorably from coast to coast.
For health professionals across America, the disease has been a ruthless attack for months, threatening their own physical and mental health as they struggle to care for others.
“There is hope, but at the same time, so much sadness for everything we’ve lost and for everything we’re still going to lose,” said Shira Doron, an infectious doctor and epidemiologist at Tufts Medical Center in Boston. “We cannot lose sight of the hundreds of thousands of people who died.”
The pandemic has been a source of singular anguish even for those used to dealing with illness and death on a daily basis.
“Sadness, devastation, is something that all of us in medicine have never seen,” said Michael White, a doctor at a 46-year-old hospital in Phoenix, a hot spot for viruses in a particularly bad state.
But White said that sheer human resilience sometimes surprised him. He watched family patriarchs struggle to regain health, pregnant women affected by COVID recovered and gave birth to their babies safely, a father hospitalized for a long time to fulfill a vow to return home with his children.
“It gives us hope to continue providing,” he said, “and fighting this virus.”
As the disease embarked on its relentless march, the elderly were hardest hit, with those over 65 accounting for about four out of five deaths in the United States, and many nursing homes and assisted living facilities destroyed. . But contagion paved the way in all age groups, sweeping away some of the young and healthy, affecting children with an inflammatory syndrome still little known.
Medical experts say the pandemic has indirectly claimed thousands of lives, with undiagnosed illnesses and delayed treatments.
Since the first months of the outbreak, the projections of infectious disease specialists were, by definition, imperfect, because they depended on public behavior and public policy choices. But over the months, the terrible progression of the pandemic has spoken for itself.
It took four months for the 100,000 death mark to be reached in May 2020. But on January 19, when the death toll reached 400,000, it took just five weeks for that number to rise to 500,000.
What everyone wants to know, of course, is when it will end.
At 52, Navajo nation police officer Carolyn Tallsalt has two decades at work, but she said last year was the most difficult.
The Navajo Nation, covering parts of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah, recorded almost 30,000 cases of coronavirus and more than 1,100 deaths. Tallsalt, who patrols in Tuba City, Arizona, 250 miles north of Phoenix, said she was discouraged when she saw people gathering indoors and breaking the night curfew because they believed the threat had passed.
“They think, ‘Oh, things are better – there is a vaccine,'” she said. “It is a mistaken thought.”
Tallsalt hopes that the terrible 500,000 death mark will be a reminder for all Americans to safeguard their health in the best possible way.
“Hopefully there will be no more than 100,000 deaths,” she said. “I don’t want to see 600,000.”
King’s editors reported from Washington, Kaleem from Los Angeles and Lee from Phoenix. The editors of the Molly Hennessy-Fiske team in Brownsville, Texas; Richard Read in Scottsdale, Arizona .; Jenny Jarvie in Atlanta; Emily Baumgaertner in Los Angeles and Eli Stokols in Washington contributed to this report.