Covid 19 coronavirus: the death toll in the United States reaches 200,000

The death toll in the United States from the coronavirus surpassed 200,000 on Tuesday, an unimaginable figure eight months ago when the scourge first reached the world’s richest nation and its state-of-the-art laboratories, world-class scientists and reserves of medicines and emergency supplies.

“It’s completely unfathomable that we’ve gotten to this point,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, a public health researcher at Johns Hopkins University.

Johns Hopkins reported the grim milestone, by far the highest number of confirmed deaths from the virus in the world, according to figures provided by state health authorities. But the actual death toll is believed to be much higher, in part because many Covid-19 deaths were likely attributed to other causes, especially early on, before widespread testing.

The death toll in the United States equates to a 9/11 attack every day for 67 days. It is roughly equal to the population of Salt Lake City or Huntsville, Alabama.

And it’s still going up. Deaths are occurring at about 770 a day on average, and a widely cited model from the University of Washington predicts that the death toll in the U.S. will double to 400,000 by the end of the year as schools and colleges reopen and the cold weather begins.

A vaccine is unlikely to be widely available until next year.

“The idea of ​​200,000 deaths is really very sobering, in some ways impressive,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s leading infectious disease expert, said on CNN.

The United States reached the threshold six weeks before a presidential election that will likely be in part a referendum on President Donald Trump’s handling of the crisis.

In an interview Tuesday with a Detroit television station, Trump boasted of doing an “amazing” and “incredible” job against the scourge, adding: “The only thing we’ve done a bad job at is public relations. because we haven’t been able to convince people, which is basically fake news, what a great job we’ve done. “

And in a prerecorded speech at a virtual meeting of the UN General Assembly, Trump lashed out at Beijing for what he called “the China virus” and demanded that it be held responsible for “unleashing this plague on the world.” The Chinese ambassador rejected the accusations as unfounded.

For five months, the United States has led the world by far in large numbers of confirmed infections and deaths. The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population, but more than 20 percent of the reported deaths.

Brazil ranks second with about 137,000 deaths, followed by India with about 89,000 and Mexico with about 74,000. Only Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Spain and Brazil rank higher in deaths from Covid-19 per capita.

“All the leaders of the world underwent the same test, and some succeeded and others failed,” said Dr. Cedric Dark, an emergency physician at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston who has seen death firsthand. “In the case of our country, we failed miserably.”

Blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans have accounted for a disproportionate share of deaths, underscoring the health care and economic disparities in the US.

Worldwide, the virus has infected more than 31 million people and is rapidly approaching 1 million deaths, with more than 965,000 lives lost, according to the Johns Hopkins tally, although the actual numbers are believed to be more. high due to gaps in testing and reporting. .

For the United States, it wasn’t supposed to.

As the year began, the United States had recently gained recognition for its pandemic preparedness. Health officials seemed confident when they converged on Seattle in January to deal with the first known case of the coronavirus in the country, in a 35-year-old Washington state resident who had returned from visiting family in Wuhan, China.

On February 26, Trump lifted pages of the Global Health Security Index, a measure of preparedness for health crises, and declared, “The United States is ranked number one most prepared.”

That was true. The United States outperformed the other 194 countries in the index. In addition to its labs, experts, and strategic reserves, the US could boast of its disease trackers and plans to rapidly communicate life-saving information during a crisis.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was respected around the world for sending aid to fight infectious diseases.

But monitoring at airports was weak. The travel bans came too late. Only later did health officials realize that the virus could spread before symptoms appear, making detection imperfect. The virus also spread to nursing homes, where infection controls were already poor, claiming more than 78,000 lives.

At the same time, gaps in leadership led to shortages of test supplies. Internal warnings to increase mask production were ignored, leaving states to compete for protective gear.

Trump downplayed the threat early on, advanced unfounded notions about the virus’s behavior, promoted unproven or dangerous treatments, complained that too much testing was making the United States look bad, and disdained masks, turning facial covering into a political problem.

On April 10, the president predicted that the United States would not see 100,000 deaths. That milestone was reached on May 27.

Nowhere was a lack of leadership considered more crucial than in testing, a key to breaking the chain of contagion.

“From the beginning we have lacked a national testing strategy,” Nuzzo said. “For reasons I really can’t understand, we have refused to develop one.”

Such coordination should be led by the White House, not by each state independently, he said.

Roberto Tobias Jr., a 17-year-old from Queens in New York City, lost his mother and father to Covid-19 within a month of each other in the spring. He and his sister also contracted the virus, but recovered. Tobias is now applying to college, hoping to enter Columbia University and become a neurosurgeon.

“Because it’s just me and my sister, we have to depend on each other,” he said. “We were the only blood left.”

The actual death toll from the crisis could be significantly higher: Up to 215,000 more people than usual died in the United States from all causes during the first seven months of 2020, according to CDC figures. Johns Hopkins put the death toll from Covid-19 during the same period at 150,000.

Researchers suspect that some coronavirus deaths were missed, and other deaths may have been indirectly caused by the crisis, creating such confusion that people with chronic conditions like diabetes or heart disease were unable or unwilling to receive treatment.

Dark, the Baylor ER doctor, said that before the crisis, “people used to look at America with a certain degree of reverence. For democracy. For our moral leadership in the world. Support science and use technology to travel to the moon” . “

“Instead,” he said, “what has really been exposed is how anti-science we have become.”

– Associated Press