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The number of lives lost could fill New York’s Madison Square Garden nearly 20 times, and roughly equates to the population of Tampa, Florida, or Tulsa, Oklahoma.
The 400,000 lives lost represent more deaths than the number of American soldiers who died in combat during World War I, World War II and the Vietnam War combined, according to an analysis of data compiled by the Department of Veterans Affairs.
The milestone comes just over a month after the country surpassed 300,000 confirmed COVID-19 deaths on December 14, and just 17 days since the United States reached 350,000 reported deaths on January 2, according to data collected. by Johns Hopkins University.
“That the United States has reached the grotesque milestone of 400,000 [COVID-19] the dead should stop us in our tracks. We should demand an explanation from our leaders as to why they allowed 100,000 Americans to die in the past month alone without taking action to end this horrific loss of life, ”said Jennifer Nuzzo, public health researcher at Johns Hopkins, ABC. New.
Globally, the virus has killed more than 2 million people. The United States accounts for about 19.5% of COVID-19-related deaths globally – about 188,000 reported deaths ahead of the second-hardest-hit country, Brazil. The United States makes up just over 4% of the world’s population.
Experts had warned for months that if Americans did not take the necessary safety precautions to protect themselves and others during the winter – and especially during the holidays – many people would suffer the consequences.
During a White House task force briefing on March 29, President Donald Trump said that if the United States could keep the death toll between 100,000 and 200,000 lives lost, it would mean that the administration had “done a very good job”.
However, by Labor Day 189,000 Americans had already died, and in October Dr Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading disease specialist, 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,” Fauci said at a virtual event with the American University of Washington, DC.
The totals have largely eclipsed the task force’s early estimates, and now the new Biden administration is warning that “the dark winter” is not over yet. Dr Rochelle Walensky, who has been nominated by Biden to become the next director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told CBS “Face the Nation” on Sunday that in mid-February, “we are forecasting half a million dead in this country. “From COVID-19.
“We still haven’t seen the ramifications of what happened from the vacation trip, to the vacation gatherings, in terms of the high rates of hospitalizations and deaths afterwards,” Walensky added.
The United States currently averages just under 3,300 new coronavirus-related deaths per day, and as of the start of the month, more than 53,000 COVID-19-related deaths were recorded – or about 1 American death every 30 seconds.
“We cannot let ourselves be numbed in the face of this moral and leadership failure. We need to redouble our efforts to stop the virus from spreading, ”Nuzzo said.
The milestone also comes within days of the first anniversary of the country’s first confirmed COVID-19 case, which was reported on January 21, 2020, according to the CDC.
The total number of cases in the United States now exceeds 24 million, but the national seven-day average of daily cases is currently down from the record set earlier last week – with an average of around 207,000 new cases confirmed daily.
This is a drop from the record recorded last Monday, although the country has not seen a day with fewer than 100,000 cases reported in 11 weeks.
Hospitalizations have also fallen nationwide, with just under 124,000 patients currently hospitalized across the country, up from 132,000 earlier this week.
The staggering COVID-19 figures also follow the announcement of a new CDC report, which warned that the UK variant could worsen the pandemic in the United States, without “universal and heightened respect” for wearing masks and social distancing. The new variant, believed to be more contagious than previous strains, has now been discovered in at least 20 states, according to an ABC News tally.
The number of cases of 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, it’s going to start to take hold,” Gottlieb said in an interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation”.
And as the death toll continues to rise, state officials continue to call for vaccinations for their residents, in a desperate effort to slow the death rate.
“Each dose of vaccine placed in a warehouse rather than in an arm could mean an additional death that could have been avoided,” concluded last week the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Alex Azar.
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