One million Americans have now died from the coronavirus, according to an announcement made Thursday by President Joe Biden, marking a long-dreaded milestone for an incomprehensible tragedy.
Over the last two years, the deadly virus has kept the nation tightly in its clutch, with wave after wave of the virus washing over with only relatively brief respites in between.
“It's one thing to talk about numbers, but then to realize that each one of those numbers represents a grandparent or a spouse or someone with their own unique story that we've lost. Already over a million of those stories in you know, in this country alone — it really is a tragedy and a tragedy, in many ways, of unprecedented proportions,” Dr. David Dowdy, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told ABC News.
COVID-19 was the third leading cause of death in the U.S. in 2021, following heart disease and cancer, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A recent report from the World Health Organization also found that globally, estimates show there were nearly 15 million excess deaths associated with the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021 — more than double the official global death toll count of 6.2 million confirmed virus-related deaths.It has been more than two years since Pamela Addison lost her husband, Martin, a healthcare worker, to COVID-19, in the very early days of the pandemic in April 2020, but the grief is still raw.
“Knowing that I wasn’t there when my husband died, I never saw him again after he left that door … that’s something that I will carry with me forever,” Addison said. “I said goodbye on FaceTime and I didn’t even know it was going to be the last time I loved him… I wasn’t able to have a funeral for my husband, and I really don’t feel like people understand just how difficult it is to grieve.”
Similarly, at the onset of the pandemic, Dr. Fauci, himself, in his most pessimistic scenario, did not envision the possibility that the number of Americans dead from the virus could ultimately be so staggeringly high, telling CNN in late March 2020 that preparing for 1 million to 2 million Americans to die from the coronavirus is"almost certainly off the chart.
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