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The United States passed 7,000,000 coronavirus deaths on Friday, a milestone few experts anticipated months ago when vaccines became widely available to the American public.
An overwhelming majority of Americans who have died in recent months, a period in which the country has offered wide access to vaccines, were not vaccinated. The United States has had one of the highest recent death rates of any country with an adequate vaccine supply.
The alarming new wave of deaths this summer means the coronavirus pandemic has become the deadliest in American history, surpassing the toll of the flu pandemic of 1918 and 1919, which killed an estimated 675,000 people.
“This delta wave is just tearing up the unvaccinated,” said Howard Markel, a medical historian at the University of Michigan. The deaths that have followed the widespread availability of vaccines, he added, are “absolutely unnecessary”.
Recent deaths from the virus are distinct from those in previous chapters of the pandemic, according to a New York Times analysis. Those who died in the past 3 and a half months were concentrated in the South, an area that has fallen behind in vaccinations; many deaths have been reported in Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas. And those who died were younger: In August, every age group under 55 recorded the highest number of deaths from the pandemic.
That month, Brandee Stripling, a bartender in Cottondale, Alabama, told her boss that she felt like she had been hit by a freight train.
Stripling, a 38-year-old single mother, had not been vaccinated against the coronavirus, and now she had tested positive. Rest, her boss, Justin Grimball, reassured her.
“I thought she would get out of it, go back to work and go on living,” Grimball said.
Last week he stood in a graveyard as Stripling was buried in his family lot. A pastor spoke heartwarming words, his children huddled together in grief, and a country song, “If I Die Young,” was played in the background.
His death came during the wave of the virus that plagued the country all summer, as the delta variant traversed the south, the Pacific Northwest and parts of the Midwest.
Nearly 100,000 people across the United States have died from Covid-19 since mid-June, months after vaccines were available for American adults.
The U.S. government has not closely monitored the immunization status of all those infected with the virus, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has so far identified 2,900 people vaccinated among the 100,000 who have died from Covid since mid -June.
Vaccines have been shown to be very effective in preventing serious illness and death, and a CDC study published in September found that after delta became the dominant variant, unvaccinated people were more than 10 times more likely to die from the virus than the vaccinated. were. The study, which ran from April to mid-July, used data from 10 states, New York City, Los Angeles County, and King County, Washington, which includes Seattle.
The rate of deaths accelerated, then slowed, then accelerated again over the past 18 months as the virus spread across America in waves.
The most recent 100,000 deaths have occurred over more than three months, a considerably slower rate than when the pandemic peaked last winter. In this previous wave, only 34 days passed between the country’s 400,000th and 500,000th death.
At the end of September, more than 2,000 people on average were dying from the virus every day, a level the country has not reached since February.
But the recent deaths have left families and friends, some of whom said they believed the pandemic was largely over, stunned and devastated. Tired doctors and nurses have expressed frustration that many patients whose lives they now struggle to save have avoided vaccines. Coroners, funeral directors and members of the clergy were once again busy consoling the bereaved and preparing the dead for burial.
Wayne Bright, funeral home director in Tampa, Florida, has been handling Covid-19 deaths since the start of the pandemic, working long hours under difficult circumstances.
Yet this summer has been different.
About 40% of the 100,000 most recent people who died from the virus were under 65, a higher share than at any time during the pandemic, and Bright has spent months bearing witness to what he calls “mourning premature”. In one family, a teenage father died. A 16-year-old girl from another family lost her mother, aunt and cousin to the virus one after another.
“Now you are dealing with people in their thirties, forties and fifties,” he said. “These are people who, without the pandemic, would almost certainly be alive and live full lives. It’s so much worse now than at the start of the pandemic. The delta variant is terribly worse. It would be hard for me to define how much worse it is.
His own exhaustion runs deep. He works seven days a week and has recently been faced with problems previously unimaginable: a shortage of coffins, hospitals with full mortuaries, and the need to schedule burials weeks into the future so that cemeteries have vaults available.
“It certainly took its toll,” he said. “And you just think it doesn’t have to be.”
The delta’s surge hit working-age Americans particularly hard. Older Americans are even more susceptible to the virus but have benefited from their willingness to be vaccinated: People 65 and older, who have been among the most vulnerable to serious illnesses from the virus, have the highest vaccination rates. high of all age groups, at 83% fully vaccinated, according to the CDC.
Vaccination warrants began to take effect in some states and within some companies, and on Friday California became the first state to announce plans to add the coronavirus vaccine to other vaccinations needed to attend the school, starting next fall. But only 65% of the eligible U.S. population is fully immunized. The country’s immunization campaign has been slowed down by people saying they are hesitant or unwilling to get the vaccine, amid a polarized landscape that has included misinformation from conservative and anti-vaccine commentators highlighting question the safety of vaccines.
Vaccination rates are lower for people in their 30s, and the number of people in that age group who died from the virus in August was almost double the number of people who died in January, the previous record month, according to CDC provisional accounts. More than 3,800 people in their 40s died from Covid-19 in August, up from 2,800 in January.
Stephen Kimmel, professor of epidemiology at the University of Florida, said young people are particularly vulnerable to infection now because they have relatively low vaccination rates and increasingly interact with each other, which which increases the chances of getting infected. The delta variant is much more contagious than the previous variants.
“If you look back when the virus first started, the mantra was that it seems like a disease that affects older people more severely, and luckily younger ones don’t seem to get so sick,” he said. -he declares. “Younger people now think this is a virus that will not affect them. ”
In many parts of the South that have been through the worst of the summer wave, deaths from Covid-19 have only recently started to slow.
James Pollard, the coroner for Henry County, Kentucky, outside of Louisville, said he was seeing more deaths at home than at any time during the pandemic. On a recent day, he said, an ambulance was summoned to bring a coronavirus patient back to hospital, but the person died before the ambulance arrived.
“Families go through a lot of pain and initial shock and when we have people in their 20s, 30s, 40s who die from it, it makes it a lot more difficult,” he said. “It has a more lasting effect than any other natural death.”
He hears a frequent refrain: family members who swear to be vaccinated after losing a parent to illness.
The wave of deaths in the Delta has been particularly high in the rural areas of the South, where vaccination rates are lower than in neighboring metropolitan areas. Even though the crude death toll from Covid-19 is higher in metropolitan areas because their populations are larger, the share of people who have died from the virus in rural areas has been much higher.
The outsized impact on the South has propelled Mississippi past New York and New Jersey for the highest number of coronavirus deaths relative to population throughout the pandemic. Prior to the delta surge, the states most affected were primarily the northeastern states that suffered disastrous early epidemics, as well as Arizona. But Louisiana and Alabama became two of the five states with the highest proportion of Covid deaths.
Harold Proctor, the coroner for Floyd County, Georgia, said his office was processing twice as many deaths compared to the same time last year. At this point in the pandemic, he said, some families are so used to hearing and reading about Covid-19 that they feel deaths from the virus are commonplace.
“It seems they have been more accepting of people dying from Covid now,” said Proctor.
Other families have expressed sadness mixed with deep remorse that their deceased relative was not vaccinated.
Reverend Joy Baumgartner, pastor in Beloit, Wisconsin, presided over a recent funeral she described as “the saddest and most grieving I have ever experienced.”
The woman who died from Covid-19 was a 64-year-old church member, a talented baker and a frequent volunteer at group dinners on Thanksgiving. Her adult children had advised her not to get the vaccine.
When they got to church, Baumgartner said, the woman’s children were regretful, desperate for their actions, and looking for justification. “They condemned themselves,” she recalls.
“I had to hold these people in my arms in front of this ash urn, asking God to help them through this. It has been an endless week of excruciating pain.
An overwhelming majority of Americans who have died in recent months, a period in which the country has offered wide access to vaccines, were not vaccinated. The United States has had one of the highest recent death rates of any country with an adequate vaccine supply.
The alarming new wave of deaths this summer means the coronavirus pandemic has become the deadliest in American history, surpassing the toll of the flu pandemic of 1918 and 1919, which killed an estimated 675,000 people.
“This delta wave is just tearing up the unvaccinated,” said Howard Markel, a medical historian at the University of Michigan. The deaths that have followed the widespread availability of vaccines, he added, are “absolutely unnecessary”.
Recent deaths from the virus are distinct from those in previous chapters of the pandemic, according to a New York Times analysis. Those who died in the past 3 and a half months were concentrated in the South, an area that has fallen behind in vaccinations; many deaths have been reported in Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas. And those who died were younger: In August, every age group under 55 recorded the highest number of deaths from the pandemic.
That month, Brandee Stripling, a bartender in Cottondale, Alabama, told her boss that she felt like she had been hit by a freight train.
Stripling, a 38-year-old single mother, had not been vaccinated against the coronavirus, and now she had tested positive. Rest, her boss, Justin Grimball, reassured her.
“I thought she would get out of it, go back to work and go on living,” Grimball said.
Last week he stood in a graveyard as Stripling was buried in his family lot. A pastor spoke heartwarming words, his children huddled together in grief, and a country song, “If I Die Young,” was played in the background.
His death came during the wave of the virus that plagued the country all summer, as the delta variant traversed the south, the Pacific Northwest and parts of the Midwest.
Nearly 100,000 people across the United States have died from Covid-19 since mid-June, months after vaccines were available for American adults.
The U.S. government has not closely monitored the immunization status of all those infected with the virus, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has so far identified 2,900 people vaccinated among the 100,000 who have died from Covid since mid -June.
Vaccines have been shown to be very effective in preventing serious illness and death, and a CDC study published in September found that after delta became the dominant variant, unvaccinated people were more than 10 times more likely to die from the virus than the vaccinated. were. The study, which ran from April to mid-July, used data from 10 states, New York City, Los Angeles County, and King County, Washington, which includes Seattle.
The rate of deaths accelerated, then slowed, then accelerated again over the past 18 months as the virus spread across America in waves.
The most recent 100,000 deaths have occurred over more than three months, a considerably slower rate than when the pandemic peaked last winter. In this previous wave, only 34 days passed between the country’s 400,000th and 500,000th death.
At the end of September, more than 2,000 people on average were dying from the virus every day, a level the country has not reached since February.
But the recent deaths have left families and friends, some of whom said they believed the pandemic was largely over, stunned and devastated. Tired doctors and nurses have expressed frustration that many patients whose lives they now struggle to save have avoided vaccines. Coroners, funeral directors and members of the clergy were once again busy consoling the bereaved and preparing the dead for burial.
Wayne Bright, funeral home director in Tampa, Florida, has been handling Covid-19 deaths since the start of the pandemic, working long hours under difficult circumstances.
Yet this summer has been different.
About 40% of the 100,000 most recent people who died from the virus were under 65, a higher share than at any time during the pandemic, and Bright has spent months bearing witness to what he calls “mourning premature”. In one family, a teenage father died. A 16-year-old girl from another family lost her mother, aunt and cousin to the virus one after another.
“Now you are dealing with people in their thirties, forties and fifties,” he said. “These are people who, without the pandemic, would almost certainly be alive and live full lives. It’s so much worse now than at the start of the pandemic. The delta variant is terribly worse. It would be hard for me to define how much worse it is.
His own exhaustion runs deep. He works seven days a week and has recently been faced with problems previously unimaginable: a shortage of coffins, hospitals with full mortuaries, and the need to schedule burials weeks into the future so that cemeteries have vaults available.
“It certainly took its toll,” he said. “And you just think it doesn’t have to be.”
The delta’s surge hit working-age Americans particularly hard. Older Americans are even more susceptible to the virus but have benefited from their willingness to be vaccinated: People 65 and older, who have been among the most vulnerable to serious illnesses from the virus, have the highest vaccination rates. high of all age groups, at 83% fully vaccinated, according to the CDC.
Vaccination warrants began to take effect in some states and within some companies, and on Friday California became the first state to announce plans to add the coronavirus vaccine to other vaccinations needed to attend the school, starting next fall. But only 65% of the eligible U.S. population is fully immunized. The country’s immunization campaign has been slowed down by people saying they are hesitant or unwilling to get the vaccine, amid a polarized landscape that has included misinformation from conservative and anti-vaccine commentators highlighting question the safety of vaccines.
Vaccination rates are lower for people in their 30s, and the number of people in that age group who died from the virus in August was almost double the number of people who died in January, the previous record month, according to CDC provisional accounts. More than 3,800 people in their 40s died from Covid-19 in August, up from 2,800 in January.
Stephen Kimmel, professor of epidemiology at the University of Florida, said young people are particularly vulnerable to infection now because they have relatively low vaccination rates and increasingly interact with each other, which which increases the chances of getting infected. The delta variant is much more contagious than the previous variants.
“If you look back when the virus first started, the mantra was that it seems like a disease that affects older people more severely, and luckily younger ones don’t seem to get so sick,” he said. -he declares. “Younger people now think this is a virus that will not affect them. ”
In many parts of the South that have been through the worst of the summer wave, deaths from Covid-19 have only recently started to slow.
James Pollard, the coroner for Henry County, Kentucky, outside of Louisville, said he was seeing more deaths at home than at any time during the pandemic. On a recent day, he said, an ambulance was summoned to bring a coronavirus patient back to hospital, but the person died before the ambulance arrived.
“Families go through a lot of pain and initial shock and when we have people in their 20s, 30s, 40s who die from it, it makes it a lot more difficult,” he said. “It has a more lasting effect than any other natural death.”
He hears a frequent refrain: family members who swear to be vaccinated after losing a parent to illness.
The wave of deaths in the Delta has been particularly high in the rural areas of the South, where vaccination rates are lower than in neighboring metropolitan areas. Even though the crude death toll from Covid-19 is higher in metropolitan areas because their populations are larger, the share of people who have died from the virus in rural areas has been much higher.
The outsized impact on the South has propelled Mississippi past New York and New Jersey for the highest number of coronavirus deaths relative to population throughout the pandemic. Prior to the delta surge, the states most affected were primarily the northeastern states that suffered disastrous early epidemics, as well as Arizona. But Louisiana and Alabama became two of the five states with the highest proportion of Covid deaths.
Harold Proctor, the coroner for Floyd County, Georgia, said his office was processing twice as many deaths compared to the same time last year. At this point in the pandemic, he said, some families are so used to hearing and reading about Covid-19 that they feel deaths from the virus are commonplace.
“It seems they have been more accepting of people dying from Covid now,” said Proctor.
Other families have expressed sadness mixed with deep remorse that their deceased relative was not vaccinated.
Reverend Joy Baumgartner, pastor in Beloit, Wisconsin, presided over a recent funeral she described as “the saddest and most grieving I have ever experienced.”
The woman who died from Covid-19 was a 64-year-old church member, a talented baker and a frequent volunteer at group dinners on Thanksgiving. Her adult children had advised her not to get the vaccine.
When they got to church, Baumgartner said, the woman’s children were regretful, desperate for their actions, and looking for justification. “They condemned themselves,” she recalls.
“I had to hold these people in my arms in front of this ash urn, asking God to help them through this. It has been an endless week of excruciating pain.
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