(TNS) — While millions wait for a lifesaving shot, the U.S. death count from COVID-19 continues to soar upward with horrifying speed. On Tuesday, the last full day of Donald Trump’s presidency, the death toll reached 400,000 — a once-unthinkable number. More than 100,000 Americans have perished in the pandemic in just the past five weeks.
In the U.S., someone now dies of COVID-19 every 26 seconds. And the disease is claiming more American lives each week than any other condition, ahead of heart disease and cancer, according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.
“It didn’t have to be like this, and it shouldn’t still be like this,” said Kristin Urquiza, whose father, Mark, died of the virus in June, as it was sweeping through Phoenix.
Urquiza described it as “watching a slow-moving hurricane” tear apart her childhood neighborhood, where many people have no choice but to keep going to work and risking their health.
“I talk to dozens of strangers a day who are going through what I did in June, but the magnitude and the haunting similarities between our stories six months later is really hard,” said Urquiza, who addressed the Democratic National Convention in August. She co-founded Marked By COVID, to organize grieving families and supporters. The group calls for a faster government response and a national memorial for pandemic victims.
Given its large population, the U.S. death rate from COVID-19 remains lower than the rate in many other countries. But the death toll of 400,000 now exceeds any other country’s count — close to double what Brazil has recorded, and four times the toll in the United Kingdom.
“It’s very hard to wrap your mind around a number that is so large, particularly when we’ve had 10 months of large numbers assaulting our senses and really, really horrific images coming out of our hospitals and our morgues,” said Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, chair of epidemiology at the University of California-San Francisco.
Scientists had long expected that wintertime could plunge the country into the deadliest months yet, but even Bibbins-Domingo wasn’t ready for the sheer pace of deaths, or the scale of the accumulated losses. The mortality burden has fallen heavily on her own state of California, which was averaging fewer than 100 deaths a day for long stretches of the pandemic, but has ranged up to more than 500 in recent days.
She said California followed the science with its handling of the pandemic, yet the devastation unfolding in places like Los Angeles reveals just how fragile any community can be.
“It’s important to understand virology. It’s important to understand epidemiology. But ultimately, what we’ve learned is that human behavior and psychology is a major force in this pandemic,” she said.
The U.S. in mid-January has averaged more than 3,300 deaths a day — well above the most devastating days of the early spring surge, when daily average deaths hovered around 2,000.
“At this point, looking at the numbers, for me the question is: Is there any way we can avoid half a million deaths before the end of February?” said Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health.
“I think of how much suffering as a nation we seem to be willing to accept that we have this number of people getting infected and dying every day.”
The path to 400,000 deaths was painfully familiar, with patterns of sickness and death repeating themselves from earlier in the pandemic.
A shocking number of people in nursing homes and assisted living facilities continue to die each week — more than 6,000 in the first week of January.
