Just slightly over 18 months since the pandemic began in 2020, the U.S. death toll from the coronavirus now stands at 700,000 despite the availability of vaccines.
As noted by ABC News, the newest data from Johns Hopkins University shows that the death rate has now surpassed the 1918 Spanish Flu fatalities without adjustment for population. Despite those grim numbers, cases and deaths have been steadily declining, with roughly 1,500 Americans dying each day, down from 2,000. John Brownstein, Ph.D., an epidemiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital, said the 700,000 death was a “completely avoidable” number due to the vaccines.
“Reaching 700,000 deaths is a tragic and completely avoidable milestone. We had the knowledge and the tools to prevent this from happening, and unfortunately politics, lack of urgency and mistrust in science got us here,” he said.
“A year and half ago, the idea of hitting 700,000 coronavirus deaths was completely unimaginable. While these horrific milestones were once a reflection of the failures of public health response, they are now a reflection of our inability to get millions of vulnerable Americans vaccinated,” he later added.
California, Texas, New York, and Florida have all recorded more than 50,000 deaths. Of the demographics most affected by the pandemic, ABC News noted that “racial and ethnic” minorities have been disproportionately harmed by the coronavirus.
“Racial and ethnic minorities in the country have borne a disproportionate share of COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths,” the outlet noted. “According to federal data, adjusted for age and population, the likelihood of death because of COVID-19, for Black, Latino and Native American people is two to three times that of white people.”
According to the New York Times, about 40 percent of the “most recent 100,000 people to die of the virus were under 65, a share higher than at any other point in the pandemic,” mostly due to lack of vaccinations.
The Delta surge has hit working-age Americans particularly hard. Older Americans are still more susceptible to the virus but have benefited from their willingness to be vaccinated: People 65 and older, who have been among the most vulnerable to serious illness from the virus, have the highest rate of vaccination of all age groups, at 83 percent fully vaccinated, according to the C.D.C.
The wave of Delta deaths has been particularly high in rural areas of the South, where vaccination rates trail those of nearby metropolitan areas. Even though the raw number of Covid-19 deaths is higher in metropolitan areas because their populations are larger, the share of people dying of the virus in rural areas has been much greater.
Wayne Bright, a funeral home director in Tampa, Florida, claimed the Delta variant made the pandemic all the worse.
“Now you’re dealing with people in their 30s and 40s and 50s,” he told the NYT. “These are people who, without the pandemic, they would almost certainly be alive and live full lives. It’s so much worse now than it was when the pandemic first happened. The Delta variant is tremendously worse. It would be hard for me to define just how much worse it is.”