The United States was on Sunday about to reach a figure that was considered unthinkable: 500,000 deaths from the coronavirus.
One year after the pandemic began, the total number of lives lost is about 498,000, roughly the population of Kansas City, Missouri, and just under Atlanta. The figure compiled by Johns Hopkins University exceeds the number of people who died in 2019 from chronic lower respiratory diseases, stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, flu and pneumonia combined.
“We have not been through something like this in the last 102 years, since the influenza pandemic of 1918,” said the country’s leading expert on infectious diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci, in statements to CNN.
The death toll from COVID-19 in the United States reached 400,000 on January 19, in the last hours of the presidency of Donald Trump, whom public health experts consider the way in which he handled the crisis was a singular failure.
The first reported deaths from the coronavirus in the United States occurred in February 2020, both in Santa Clara County, California. It took four months for the death toll to reach 100,000. In September it reached 200,000, and in December it was 300,000. Then it took just over a month to go from 300,000 to 400,000, and about two months to go from 400,000 to almost 500,000.
–
