On Friday, the US death toll from COVID-19 hit 900,000, fueled in part by the spread of the highly contagious omicron variant. It was only less than two months ago when we reached 800K deaths because of the virus.
According to the Associated Press:
The milestone comes more than 13 months into a vaccination drive that has been beset by misinformation and political and legal strife, though the shots have proved safe and highly effective at preventing serious illness and death.
“It is an astronomically high number. If you had told most Americans two years ago as this pandemic was getting going that 900,000 Americans would die over the next few years, I think most people would not have believed it,” said Dr. Ashish K. Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health.
He lamented that most of the deaths happened after the vaccine gained authorization.
“We got the medical science right. We failed on the social science. We failed on how to help people get vaccinated, to combat disinformation, to not politicize this,” Jha said. “Those are the places where we have failed as America.”
President Biden issued a statement urging people to get vaccinated and get their kids vaccinated.
From the Washington Post:
The United States is still lagging behind other wealthy countries on vaccination as political polarization, misinformation, confusing public health messaging and barriers to access continue to hobble its vaccination drive. Sixty-four percent of Americans are fully vaccinated, according to Washington Post data, and 42 percent of the fully vaccinated have received their booster dose.
Recent data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that between October and November 2021, in 25 jurisdictions in the United States, unvaccinated people were more than 53 times as likely to die of covid-19 than people who were vaccinated and boosted.
Other COVID 19 Updates:
Coronavirus in the U.S.: Latest Map and Case Count
- New coronavirus cases are falling quickly across the country. Fewer than half as many infections are being identified each day as at the peak of the Omicron surge in mid-January.
- New cases are plummeting in almost every state. In Kansas and Virginia, new infection reports are down about 50 percent in the last two weeks. In New York and Maryland, new cases are down more than 70 percent in the last two weeks.
- West Virginia has the highest recent hospitalization rate of any state. Case numbers there peaked later than in most other Eastern states.
Some states still have rising case rates:
***Warning: To view these maps and understand other statistics, you must grasp that ‘bigly concept,’ per capita.
