US Covid-19 death toll exceeds 500,000

On July 11 at 5 p.m., Tara Krebbs received a call at her home in Phoenix. Her mother was on the other side and was crying hysterically. Tara’s father woke up unable to breathe, and he was on his way to the hospital.

Charles Krebbs, 75, began showing symptoms of Covid-19 shortly after Father’s Day in June. He first developed a fever and then lost his sense of taste and smell. While local hospitals were overwhelmed, he tried to recover at home, still awaiting the outcome of a Covid-19 test that took weeks to plan. His results were not yet back – even when EMTs rushed him to the emergency room.

Just a few weeks earlier, Tara had dropped off a Father’s Day gift at her parents’ home with a card that read “next year it will be better.” It was the last time she saw her father until the night he died, when she took an hour to say goodbye in person at the ICU. After nearly four weeks in hospital, he lost his battle with the coronavirus in early August.

Charles Krebbs is one of more than 500,000 Americans who died from Covid-19, a staggering toll that comes about a year after the virus was first detected in the US. according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. And for each of the lives lost, there are children, spouses, siblings and friends left behind.

‘I’m looking at old photos of him holding me and you can see how much he loved me,” Tara said of her father, who worked as a realtor and appraiser in Maricopa County. He was a music lover and history lover who enjoyed living close to his daughter and her family, takes his grandson after his first day of kindergarten and coaches his Little League teams.

“He was just a caring, practical man who liked his family more than anything,” Krebbs said.

The bad milestone of today comes on the heels of some of the deadliest months of the pandemic. After a fall and winter surge in Covid-19 cases, there were 81,000 deaths in December and 95,000 in January, both surpassing April’s peak of just over 60,000. At the same time, US health officials are rushing to increase the pace of Covid-19 vaccinations across the country.

Horrible beacon

Although the virus has been with us for more than a year, the extent of the death toll is difficult to determine.

When U.S. health officials gave early estimates of hundreds of thousands of deaths last spring, ‘people thought we were hyperbolic about this, and that was clearly not the case. White House Chief Medical Officer Anthony Fauci told CBS News on Monday.

Nearly as many Americans are now dead to Covid-19 as were killed in the First and Second World Wars combined. The U.S. death toll represents a population about the size of Atlanta or Kansas City, Missouri.

“Even if you hear half a million people die, it sounds like a very large number, but it’s hard to put it into perspective,” said Cynthia Cox, vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit organization focused on national health issues, said. . “It’s hard for people to hear these big numbers and put faces in front of them.”

One reason for this is the nature of how these deaths often occurred, in isolation and away from loved ones.

“The thing that sets Covid apart from other mass casualty events is the lack of video or personal commitment at the time of death,” Cox said. “Covid wards are so closed for security reasons that we do not have news cameras in to show what it really looks like. We hear very large numbers, but we do not get that personal connection unless we know someone.”

David Kessler, a mourning expert and author from Los Angeles who runs an online support group for those who have lost someone to Covid, said 500,000 deaths is a number the mind does not want to understand.

“Such a number make the world dangerous, and we would rather not live in a dangerous world,” he said.

In search of a reference point, Kessler compares the death toll from Covid with the two Boeing 737 Max plane crashes in 2018 and 2019 in which a total of 346 people were killed.

“Think about how much 737 Maxes went down, how much news we had and the footage we had,” he said. “You do not realize that 500,000 people is equivalent to almost 3,000 planes going down. Eight would have gone down yesterday. Can you imagine eight planes crashing every day?”

A major cause of death in the US

The Covid-19 death toll places the disease among the leading causes of death in the United States. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention alone, in 2019, heart disease and cancer alone killed more than 500,000 people in a year, the most recent annual figures available. When the daily death toll peaked in January, Cox found in an analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation that Covid kills more people a day than any other cause.

However, Covid-19 is a single disease, and not a group of diseases that make up the CDC’s broader cause of death categories such as heart disease and cancer. The Covid-19 numbers are even stronger compared to other specific diseases, such as lung cancer, in which 140,000 Americans died in 2019, Alzheimer’s disease, which killed 121,000, or breast cancer, which killed 43,000.

Cox said the death toll in Covid was “much greater than any other single disease.”

The impact of the disease is so great that in the first half of 2020 it dropped life expectancy by one year in the US – according to the latest analysis by the CDC, a staggering decline.

The United States was one of the countries hardest hit by the coronavirus, with more deaths reported than anywhere else in the world. According to the population, the US only follows the UK, Czech Republic, Italy and Portugal in deaths per capita, according to an analysis by Johns Hopkins University.

“She meant a lot to a lot of people.”

Isabelle Odette Papadimitriou was a respiratory therapist in Dallas who cared for Covid patients at the hospital where she worked during the spring and summer. At the end of June, she contracted the virus herself and died shortly afterwards on July 4, her favorite holiday. She was 64.

Her daughter, Fiana Tulip, remembers her mother as someone who was ‘strong as an ox’ and made it into countless flu outbreaks in her thirty-year career. A fan of the British royal family who treated her two dogs “like little people” said she was the type of mother who would send her daughter Amazon packages as soon as she thought she needed something. After she dies, Tulip receives a pair of pink shoes that Papadimitriou sent to Tulip’s daughter, her first grandchild.

Over the course of the summer, Tulip received calls from her mother’s former colleagues and friends, ranging from an employee at Papadimitriou’s local doggy daycare to the owner of a storage unit she rented in Texas.

“People who loved my mother just came out,” Tulip said. “She meant a lot to a lot of people.”

The pandemic is not over yet

Coronavirus cases in the US have been declining in recent weeks, and the rate of reported deaths is also slowing. According to Johns Hopkins University, the country has just under 1,900 Covid-19 deaths per day, based on a weekly average, lower than more than 3,300 per day.

Nevertheless, the death toll will continue to rise. Projections from the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington show a range of 571,000 to 616,000 total Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. as of June 1, based on different scenarios.

Fauci, the country’s leading expert on infectious diseases, warned Americans on Sunday to avoid a sense of dissatisfaction with Covid-19, despite declining case numbers, saying that ‘the baseline of daily infections is still very, very high’ .

The CDC also identified at least three mutant virus strains in the US, some of which are more transmissible than the dominant strain, although experts have largely said they expect the current vaccines provides some protection against these variants.

So far, about 44 million people, about 13% of the population, have received at least one shot Pfizer or Moderna dual vaccine, and President Joe Biden suggested at a CNN City Hall last week that the country could return to some normalcy by Christmas.

But for those who have lost a loved one to Covid-19, Kessler, the mourning expert, said things would not be the same.

“When you talk about family members, we do not recover from loss,” he said. “We must learn to live with the loss.”