COVID-19 deaths in the United States surpassed 500,000 Monday, the newest abandoned intermediate station in a sprawling landscape of loss.
The toll is difficult to fathom. It’s like all the people in a city the size of Atlanta or Sacramento just disappeared. The number is greater than the combined US battlefield deaths in both World Wars and Vietnam. Last month, based on the average number of fatalities that happened 24 hours a day, it was as if the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 had happened every day.
“You see that number, and it’s not just any number,” said Bettina Gonzales, 39, whose 61-year-old father, David Gonzales, a popular football and basketball coach in Harlingen, Texas, died in August. “There is a lot of tragedy behind that number.”
Recorded COVID-19 deaths in the US account for about a fifth of the world’s nearly 2.5 million known fatalities from the disease, twice as many as in Brazil, the second most affected country. Nearly 50,000 deaths have occurred in California alone, about 10% of the country’s total. Nearly 20,000 of these were in Los Angeles County, where about one in 500 people has died.
President Biden, marking the sad milestone Monday night, urged the nation to honor the dead by observing public health measures to end the pandemic.
“The people we lost were extraordinary. They spanned generations. Born in America, emigrated to America. But just like that, so many of them took their last breaths alone in America, ”he said in comments at the White House. “We shouldn’t let the grief numb us. We must resist seeing every life as a statistic. “
Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, along with their husbands, then stood silently amid 500 candles – commemorating 500,000 dead – placed along the steps of the South Portico. The Marine band played ‘Amazing Grace’.
Poets and philosophers – and social science researchers – know that huge numbers of deaths can become abstractions. For America as a whole, it may be; for those touched by individual grief, it is the opposite.
People who have lost loved ones or sustained permanent physical harm from an episode of COVID-19 sometimes speak of feeling stranded on the other side of a great chasm, alienated from fellow countrymen wondering when they can go back to bars and baseball spell.
Among the millions of mourners, some still can hardly believe that a loved one who outlived so many others was wiped out.
Ralph Hakman, a Holocaust survivor, was powerful in his nineties. But in the early days of the pandemic, he fell ill suddenly and died on March 22, twelve days after he turned 95th birthday.
“Had it not been for COVID, I truly believe he would have been over 100,” said his 89-year-old widow, Barbara Zerulik, who fell ill around the same time as Hakman and was diagnosed with COVID-19. Her husband was not tested for the virus, but doctors believe it killed him.
Born in Poland to an Orthodox Jewish family, Hakman survived in Auschwitz for three years before emigrating to the US. He raised two children in Beverly Hills with his first wife, also a Holocaust survivor.
“He survived such brutal hatred and violence when he was young – he was so strong,” said Zerulik, who spent months in hospital and rehabilitation before moving to Jacksonville, Florida, to live with her daughter. “Then this disease brought him down.”
Public figures searched history to find parallels to these troubled times. Biden’s chief medical adviser, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said in a television interview Sunday that half a million deaths are like nothing “we’ve ever experienced in the past 102 years, since the 1918 flu pandemic.” The deaths in the US then were a cataclysmic 675,000, albeit insignificant at a worldwide toll of 50 million.
Over the past year, the pandemic has left few American lives unharmed. All the ways in which society is organized – school and work, economy and government, friendship and family life, love and romance – have changed, in some cases irrevocably.
Holly Maxwell, a kindergarten teacher in Ohio, loved hugging her little students when they needed comfort. Her school outside of Uniontown offers face-to-face classes all year round, but she only has a dozen students instead of the usual 22, and a social distance of six feet is carefully considered.
That means no group of 5-year-olds around Maxwell’s rocking chair for stories, no playing together with building blocks and puzzles.
“The socio-emotional effects of this will be enormous for this age group,” said Maxwell, a 48-year-old mother of two who taught for 22 years. ‘They should learn how to be friends – they want to play together. It hurts my heart. “
The contamination has radically changed end-of-life farewells and mourning rituals. While David Gonzales, the Texas coach, was dying on a ventilator after a month, nurses called his daughter, Bettina, from his hospital room on FaceTime. In the confusion, the phone in his room had turned to the wall and Bettina’s screen went blank.
“I could hear the chest compressions, air flowing through his body,” she recalls. “Finally I heard the flatline.”
Caring for the dead – so many, many dead – has been both an extraordinary burden and a sacred duty. That duty is close to home for Michael Fowler, the 62-year-old coroner for Dougherty County in rural southwest Georgia.
In his close-knit, largely black community, he has cared for the bodies of neighbors and relatives by zipping the body bag over a familiar face.
“When so many of the dead are your friends and colleagues, it takes its toll,” he said.
As of March, he has declared 267 COVID-related deaths, answered phone calls in the middle of the night, took photos, and notified relatives. At times, families were so ravaged by the disease that there was no one to give instructions on which funeral home to use.
“It was just overwhelming,” he said. “A man was reportedly in hospital on a ventilator after his wife died.”
During its deadliest month – April, when 86 COVID-19 deaths occurred in the county – the local morgue ran out of space and the Federal Emergency Management Agency brought refrigerated 18-wheelers to the storage of corpses.
Fowler has lost so much weight that he has to pin his pants. He hasn’t had a vacation for months. He often goes to the office at night to fill out paperwork and misses sleep. But his latest task has given him a glimmer of hope: informing the residents of the province where they can get vaccinated.
“I can see the light now,” he said. “With the vaccine and all the precautions everyone is taking, things will get a lot better.”
This is not the darkest hour of the pandemic; that may already be over. New US cases have been falling for five weeks; The rollout of vaccines, despite delays and shortages, tends to be successful – although it is also a race against deadly new variants circulating in the US and around the world.
The pandemic has exposed the shocking social inequalities in the US that have been present all along, but were thrown into great relief by the crisis.
Black people and Latinos are much more likely to have devastating medical consequences. Economic disparities abound, with wealthier Americans working from home getting through the outbreak with relative ease, even as unemployment has soared to levels not seen in decades, leaving millions of American families unable to pay for necessities such as housing and food.
At the same time, there was a bleak commonality in the threat: COVID-19 has devastated busy urban neighborhoods as well as lonely prairie cities, spinning inexorably from coast to coast.
For health workers across America, the disease has been a merciless, months-long attack, threatening their own physical and mental health as they struggled to care for others.
“There is hope, but at the same time, there is so much grief for all that we have lost and all that we will still lose,” said Shira Doron, an infectious disease physician and the hospital epidemiologist at Tufts Medical Center in Boston. “We must not lose sight of the hundreds of thousands of people who have disappeared.”
The pandemic has been a source of extraordinary fear, even for those accustomed to dealing with illness and death on a daily basis.
“The sadness, the devastation, is something that all of us in medicine have never experienced,” said Michael White, a 46-year-old hospital doctor in Phoenix, a virus hotspot in a particularly badly affected state.
But White said sheer human resilience had surprised him at times. He saw family patriarchs fight their way back to health, recover COVID-stricken pregnant women and deliver their babies safely, a long-hospitalized father fulfilling a vow to return to his children.
“It gives us hope to continue to provide,” he said, “and to fight this virus.”
As the disease continued its relentless advance, the elderly were hit hardest, with about four in five U.S. deaths to people over 65, and many nursing homes and assisted living facilities were destroyed. But contamination spread to all age brackets, wiping out some young and healthy children with a still poorly understood inflammatory syndrome.
Medical experts say the pandemic has indirectly claimed many thousands of lives, with conditions undiagnosed and treatment delayed.
From the early months of the outbreak, infectious disease specialists’ projections were by definition imperfect, as they depended on public behavior and policy choices. But over the months, the terrifying progression of the pandemic spoke for itself.
It took four months to reach the benchmark of 100,000 deaths in May 2020. But on January 19, when the toll was 400,000, it took only five weeks for that number to grow to 500,000.
What everyone wants to know, of course, is when it will end.
At the age of 52, Navajo Nation Police Officer Carolyn Tallsalt has been on the job for two decades, but she said the last year was her hardest yet.
Spread across parts of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah, the Navajo Nation has recorded nearly 30,000 coronavirus cases and more than 1,100 deaths. Tallsalt, who patrols Tuba City, Ariz., 350 miles north of Phoenix, said she was discouraged to see people gathering in houses and breaking curfews because they believed the threat was largely over.
“They think, ‘Oh, it’s getting better – there’s a vaccine,” she said. “It’s misguided thinking.”
Tallsalt hopes the horrific mark of 500,000 deaths will be a reminder for all Americans to best protect their health.
“Let’s hope there aren’t another 100,000 deaths,” she said. “I don’t want to see 600,000.”
Staff writers King reported from Washington, Lee from Phoenix and Kaleem from Los Angeles. Staff Writers Molly Hennessy-Fiske in Brownsville, Texas; Richard Read in Scottsdale, Ariz .; Jenny Jarvie in Atlanta; Emily Baumgaertner in Los Angeles and Eli Stokols in Washington contributed to this report.