For weeks after Cindy Pollock began planting flags in her yard – one for each of the more than 1,800 Idahoans killed by COVID-19 – the toll was mostly a number. Until two women she had never met rung the doorbell in tears, looking for a place to mourn the husband and father they had just lost.
Then Pollock knew that her tribute, however sincere, would never convey the grief of a pandemic that has now claimed 500,000 lives. in the US and counting.
“I just wanted to hug them,” she said. “Because that was all I could do.”
After a year of obscuring doorways in the US, the pandemic crossed a milestone on Monday that once seemed unimaginable, a stark confirmation of the virus’s reach in every corner of the country and communities of every size and composition.
“It’s very difficult for me to imagine an American who doesn’t know someone who has passed away or has a family member who has passed away,” said Ali Mokdad, a professor of health statistics at the University of Washington in Seattle. “We haven’t really fully understood how bad it is, how devastating it is, for all of us.”
Experts warn there are likely to be around 90,000 more deaths in the coming months, despite a massive vaccination campaign. Meanwhile, the nation’s trauma continues to intensify in ways unparalleled in recent American life, said Donna Schuurman of the Dougy Center for Grieving Children & Families in Portland, Oregon.
At other times of epic loss, such as the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Americans have banded together to face the crisis and comfort survivors. But this time the nation is deeply divided. An astonishing number of families are facing death, serious illness and financial difficulties. And many are left in isolation, unable even to hold funerals.
“In a way we are all mourning,” said Schuurman, who has assisted the families of those killed in terrorist attacks, natural disasters and school shootings.
In recent weeks, virus the number of deaths has fallen from over 4,000 reported on some days in January to an average of less than 1,900 a day.
Still, the toll recorded by Johns Hopkins University at half a million is already higher than the population of Miami or Kansas City, Missouri. It’s roughly equivalent to the number of Americans who died in World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War combined. It’s comparable to a 9/11 every day for nearly six months.
“The people we lost were extraordinary,” President Joe Biden said Monday, urging Americans to remember the individual lives claimed by the virus, rather than being numbed by the massive toll.
“Just like that,” he said, “so many of them took their last breath only in America.”
The toll, responsible for 1 in 5 deaths reported worldwide, has far surpassed early projections, which assumed that federal and state governments would organize a comprehensive and sustained response and that individual Americans would follow the warnings.
Instead, an attempt to reopen the economy last spring and the refusal of many to socially distance themselves and wear face masks fueled the spread.
The numbers alone don’t come close to capturing the heartbreak.
“I never doubted he wouldn’t make it. … I so believed in him and my faith, ”said Nancy Espinoza, whose husband, Antonio, was hospitalized with COVID-19 last month.
The couple from Riverside County, California, had been together since high school. They pursued a parallel nursing career and started a family. Then, on January 25, Nancy was called to Antonio’s bed, just before his heart beat for the last time. He was 36 and left behind a 3-year-old son.
‘Today we are. And tomorrow it could be anyone, ”said Nancy Espinoza.
Late last fall, 54 percent of Americans reported knowing someone who died of COVID-19 or was hospitalized with it, according to a poll by the Pew Research Center. Mourning was even more widespread among black Americans, Hispanics, and other minorities.
The number of deaths has nearly doubled since then, with the plague spreading far beyond the northeastern and northwestern metropolitan areas hit by the virus last spring and hitting Sun Belt cities hard last summer.
In some places, the seriousness of the threat was slow to dawn.
When a beloved professor at a community college in Petoskey, Michigan, died last spring, residents mourned, but many continued to question the seriousness of the threat, Mayor John Murphy said. That changed in the summer after a local family hosted a party in a barn. Of the 50 attendees, 33 became infected. Three died, he said.
“I think people at a distance were like, ‘This isn’t going to get me,’” Murphy said. “But over time, the attitude has completely changed from ‘Not me. Not our area. I’m not old enough, ‘until where it got the real deal. “
For Anthony Hernandez, whose Emmerson-Bartlett Memorial Chapel in Redlands, California, has been overwhelmed by the burial of COVID-19 victims, the most difficult conversations were the conversations with no answers as he sought to comfort mothers, fathers, and children who lost loved ones .
His chapel, which hosts 25 to 30 services in an ordinary month, handled 80 in January. He had to explain to some families that they had to wait weeks for a funeral.
“At one point, we had every stretcher, every dressing table, every balm table someone on it,” he said.
In Boise, Idaho, Pollock began the memorial service in her garden last fall to counter what she saw as a widespread denial of the threat. As the death toll increased in December, she planted 25 to 30 new flags at once. But her frustration has been somewhat mitigated by those who slow down or stop to show respect or grieve.
“I think that’s part of what I wanted, to get people talking,” she said, “not just like, ‘Look how many flags are in the yard today compared to last month,’ but people are trying to help those lost loved ones talk to other people. “
Eugene Garcia, Associated Press video journalist, contributed to this story.