"A country paralyzed by pain and loss now has to face a staggering number: 500,000 ... No other country than the United States has so many people dying from epidemics. ”
On February 21, local time, when the number of new crown deaths in the United States approached 500,000, the New York Times used 500,000 black dots to cover half of the front page.
On this dense "dot" map, each black dot represents a deceased person. It is spread in a range of 50,000 cases, and over time, the black spots become more and more dense, which also means that the growth rate of deaths in the United States is accelerating. By January 2021, the interval has almost become a black patch of color, which is shocking.
Since the first known covid-19 death in the United States in February 2020, nearly 500,000 Americans have lost their lives to COVID-19. In a New York Times report that day, Dr. Ali Mokdad, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington, said that in less than a year, the number of Americans who died of COVID-19 has exceeded the number of deaths in the country in World War I, World War II and Vietnam Combined.
According to the projection data of the Institute of Health Indicators and Evaluation of the University of Washington, by June 1 this year, that is, less than 100 days, it is expected that 91,000 Americans will be infected with the epidemic.
"Our grandchildren and future generations will look back at us and blame us for the biggest failure in facing a pandemic in a country that's the richest country in the world. That we allowed people to die, that we didn't protect our vulnerable populations – Native American, Hispanic and African Americans. That we did not protect our essential workers," Dr. Ali Mokdad, a public health researcher at the University of Washington, told the Strait Times when U.S.'s COVID-19 death toll passed the half-million milestone on Monday.
A somewhat fading grayish column appeared on the front page of the New York Times on Sunday morning as a visual representation of the "biggest failure" – half a million Americans died within a year.
A year into the pandemic, the running total of lives lost was about 502,000 as of Wednesday – roughly the population of Kansas City, Missouri, and just shy of the size of Atlanta. The figure compiled by Johns Hopkins University surpasses the number of people who died in 2019 of chronic lower respiratory diseases, stroke, Alzheimer's, flu, and pneumonia combined.
Despite efforts to administer coronavirus vaccines, a widely cited model by the University of Washington projects the U.S. death toll will surpass 589,000 by June 1.
In fact, when the number of COVID-19 deaths in the United States reached 100,000 in May last year, the New York Times used the entire front page to list the identities of 1,000 of them, and called it "an incalculable loss in the United States."
However, people who are immersed in grief do not expect that the pain and death are not over and that the epidemic continues to spiral out of control. According to the website data of Johns Hopkins University in the United States, as of now, the cumulative number of confirmed new crown cases in the United States has exceeded 28.18 million, and the cumulative number of deaths has exceeded 500,000.
In this regard, infectious disease expert Fauci also lamented in an interview with the media on Sunday that this is completely different from the situation experienced in the 1918 influenza pandemic for more than 100 years, and the pandemic is undoubtedly "devastating".
Although the statistical results are based on data provided by government agencies around the world, the actual number of deaths is considered to be much higher than the current published figures due to the lack of early knowledge of the virus and the limited detection methods at that time.
Fauci is not optimistic about the prospects for the next outbreak, and the possibility that Americans will still need to wear masks by 2022 remains, "Decades from now, people will still be talking about this epidemic."
Nine months ago, on May 24, 2020, the New York Times published a cover page with all the basic information of the 10,000 people who had died from the coronavirus then. As shocking as the image was, it didn't help stop the relentless march of death and tragedy.
"It's nothing like we have ever been through in the last 102 years, since the 1918 influenza pandemic," the nation's top infectious disease expert, Dr Anthony Fauci, said on CNN's State of the Union.
While the count is based on figures supplied by government agencies around the world, the real death toll is believed to be significantly higher, in part because of inadequate testing and cases inaccurately attributed to other causes early on.
"People will be talking about this decades and decades and decades from now," Fauci said on NBC's Meet The Press.