The inevitable, grim milestone has been reached in the U.S.:
The U.S. on Wednesday surpassed 1 million Covid-19 deaths, according to data compiled by NBC News — a once unthinkable scale of loss even for the country with the world's highest recorded toll from the virus.
The number — equivalent to the population of San Jose, California, the 10th largest city in the U.S. — was reached at stunning speed: 27 months after the country confirmed its first case of the virus. [snip]
While deaths from Covid have slowed in recent weeks, about 360 people have still been dying every day. The casualty count is far higher than what most people could have imagined in the early days of the pandemic, particularly because then-President Donald Trump repeatedly downplayed the virus while in office.
"This is their new hoax," Trump said of Democrats in front of a cheering crowd at a rally in North Charleston, South Carolina, on Feb. 28, 2020. "So far we have lost nobody to coronavirus."
A day later, health officials in Washington made the inevitable announcement: a coronavirus patient in their state had died.
Now, more than two years and 999,999 fatalities later, the U.S. death toll is the world's highest total by a significant margin, figures show. In a distant second is Brazil, which has recorded just over 660,000 confirmed Covid deaths. [snip]
Dr. Robert Murphy, executive director of the Havey Institute for Global Health at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, said many expected the U.S. to better control the virus's spread.
"We were very encouraged by the rapid development of the vaccines, and everybody really thought we were going to vaccinate our way out of this," he said. "But then we had people that wouldn't even take the damn vaccine." [snip]
More than half of U.S. Covid deaths have occurred since President Joe Biden was inaugurated in January 2021.
Most of those deaths — more than 80 percent from April to December 2021, for instance — were unvaccinated Americans, according to the CDC. As of February, the risk of death from Covid was 20 times higher for unvaccinated people than for those who were vaccinated and boosted, the CDC data showed.
"We know vaccines work. We know masks work. We know social distancing works, and we know crowd control, limiting crowded spaces, works. This is like a no-brainer, but we cannot seem to do it," Murphy said.
We don't discount the valid health reasons why some people could not get vaccinated. But we're quite certain the majority of the unvaccinated dead refused to get vaccinated as a result of unreasonable fear, a belief in quack nostrums, and/or as a political statement after Biden became President. In doing so, they endangered themselves, their families and their communities in the process. Somehow, we don't feel "owned."
What fools these mortals be.
(Cartoon: J.D. Crowe, Alabama Media Group)
