The death toll from Covid-19 in the US has exceeded 500,000

At 5 a.m. on July 11, Tara Krebbs received a call at her home in Phoenix. Her mother on the other side was crying hysterically. Tara’s father had woken up and couldn’t breathe, and he was on his way to the hospital.

Charles Krebbs, 75, started showing symptoms of Covid-19 shortly after Father’s Day in June, he first developed a fever and then lost his sense of taste and smell. With the local hospitals overwhelmed, he tried to recover at home, still awaiting the results of a Covid-19 test that had taken weeks to plan. His results still hadn’t returned – even when EMTs rushed him to the emergency room.

A few weeks earlier, Tara had delivered a Father’s Day gift to her parents’ home with a card that said “next year will be better.” It was the last time she would see her father until the night he died, when she was given an hour to say goodbye personally in the ICU. After nearly four weeks in hospital, he lost his battle with the corona virus in early August.

Charles Krebbs is one of more than 500,000 Americans who have died from Covid-19, a dizzying toll that comes about a year after the virus was first discovered in the US. according to data collected by Johns Hopkins University. And for each of those lives lost, there are children, husbands, siblings, and friends who have been left behind.

“I look at old pictures where he holds me and you can see how much he loved me, Tara said about her father, who worked as a real estate agent and appraiser in Maricopa County. He was a music lover and history buff who loved to live near his daughter and her family, taking his grandson to his first kindergarten and coaching his Little League teams.

“He was just a caring, practical man who loved his family more than anything,” said Krebbs.

Today’s grim milestone comes on the heels of some of the pandemic’s deadliest months. Following a fall and winter rise in Covid-19 cases, there were 81,000 reported deaths in December and 95,000 in January, both well above the April peak of just over 60,000. At the same time, US health officials are racing to increase the pace of Covid-19 vaccinations in the entire country.

Horrible monument

Although the virus has been with us for over a year, the magnitude of the death toll is difficult to fathom.

When US health officials gave early estimates of hundreds of thousands of deaths last spring, “people thought we were hyperbolic about that, and clearly we were not. This is a terrible milestone that we have now reached,” says Dr. Anthony Fauci, the White House’s chief medical adviser, told CBS News Monday.

Almost as many Americans have now died of Covid-19 as were killed in World Wars I and II combined. The death toll in the US represents a population roughly the size of Atlanta or Kansas City, Missouri.

“Even when you hear that about half a million people are dying, it sounds like a very large number, but it’s hard to put into perspective,” said Cynthia Cox, a vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit that focuses on national health issues. . “It’s hard for people to hear these big numbers and imagine faces.”

One reason for this is the nature of how these deaths have often occurred, isolated and away from loved ones.

“What’s different about Covid from other mass victim events is the lack of video or personal connection at the time of death,” said Cox. “Covid departments are closed for security reasons so we don’t have news cameras to show us what this really looks like. We hear a lot of big numbers, but we don’t get that personal connection until we know someone.”

David Kessler, a Los Angeles grief expert and author who has led an online support group for those who lost someone to Covid, said 500,000 deaths is a number “the mind doesn’t want to understand.”

“Such a number makes the world dangerous, and we prefer not to live in a dangerous world,” he said.

Looking for a point of reference, Kessler compared Covid’s death toll to the two Boeing 737 Max plane crashes in 2018 and 2019 that killed a total of 346 people.

“Think how many 737 Maxes were lost, how many news we had, and what images we had,” he said. ‘You don’t realize that 500,000 people are the equivalent of nearly 3,000 crashed planes. Eight would have crashed yesterday. Can you imagine eight planes crashing every day? ‘

A leading cause of death in the US.

The death toll from Covid-19 makes the disease one of the leading causes of death in the United States. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2019 alone, heart disease and cancer killed more than 500,000 people in a year, the most recent annual figures available. When the daily death toll peaked in January, Cox found in an analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation that Covid was killing more people per day than any other cause.

However, Covid-19 is a single disease and not a group of diseases that make up the CDC’s broader cause of death categories, such as heart disease and cancer. The Covid-19 numbers are even grimmer when compared to other specific diseases such as lung cancer, which killed 140,000 Americans in 2019, Alzheimer’s disease, which killed 121,000, or breast cancer, which killed 43,000.

Breaking out in this way, Cox said, the death toll from Covid is “really much greater than any other single disease.”

The effect of the disease is so profound that in the first half of 2020, life expectancy in the US fell by a year – a staggering drop, according to the latest analysis from the CDC.

The United States is one of the hardest hit countries by the coronavirus, with more reported deaths than anywhere else in the world. According to an analysis by Johns Hopkins University, the US only tracks the UK, the Czech Republic, Italy and Portugal in terms of deaths per capita.

‘She meant a lot to many people’

Isabelle Odette Papadimitriou was a Dallas respiratory therapist who spent the spring and summer caring for Covid patients at the hospital where she worked. At the end of June, she caught the virus herself and died shortly afterwards, on July 4, her favorite holiday. She was 64.

Her daughter, Fiana Tulip, remembers her mother as someone who was “strong as an ox” who had endured numerous flu outbreaks in her 30-year career. A fan of the British Royal Family who treated her two dogs “like little people,” Tulip said she was the type of mother who would send her daughter Amazon packages as soon as she thought she needed anything. After her death, Tulip received a pair of pink fringe shoes that Papadimitriou had sent for Tulip’s daughter, her first grandchild.

Over the summer, Tulip received calls from ex-colleagues and friends of her mother, ranging from an employee at the local Papadimitriou dog shelter to the owner of a storage unit she rented in Texas.

“People who loved my mother just came out,” said Tulip. “She meant a lot to many people.”

The pandemic is not over yet

The number of coronavirus cases in the US has fallen sharply in recent weeks, and the rate of reported deaths is also slowing. According to data from Johns Hopkins University, on a weekly average, the country is dying just under 1,900 Covid-19 deaths per day, compared to more than 3,300 per day in mid-January.

Still, the death toll will continue to rise. Projections from the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington show a range of 571,000 to 616,000 total Covid-19 deaths in the US on June 1, based on different scenarios.

Fauci, the nation’s largest infectious disease expert, warned Americans on Sunday to avoid feeling a sense of complacency from Covid-19 despite the declining number of cases, saying that “the baseline of daily infections is still very, very is. “

The CDC has also identified at least three mutant strains of viruses in the US, some of which have been shown to be more transmissible than the dominant strain, although experts have largely said that they expect current vaccines provide some protection against these variants.

So far, about 44 million people, about 13% of the population, have received at least one injection either the two injection vaccines from Pfizer or Moderna and President Joe Biden suggested at a CNN town hall last week that the country could get a little normal again by Christmas.

But for those who lost a loved one to Covid-19, Kessler, the grief expert, said things won’t be the same.

“When you talk about family members, we don’t recover from a loss,” he said. “We have to learn to live with the loss.”