The two-year total compiled by Johns Hopkins University comes less than two months after eclipsing 800,000 deaths
By VT
Guardian: Propelled in part by the wildly contagious Omicron variant, the US death toll from Covid-19 hit 900,000 on Friday, less than two months after eclipsing 800,000.
The two-year total, as compiled by Johns Hopkins University, is greater than the population of Indianapolis, San Francisco, or Charlotte, North Carolina.
The milestone comes more than 13 months into a vaccination drive that has been beset by misinformation and political and legal strife, though the shots have proved safe and highly effective at preventing serious illness and death.
Despite its wealth and world-class medical institutions, the US has the highest reported toll of any country and even then, the real number of lives lost directly or indirectly to the coronavirus is thought to be significantly higher.
“It is an astronomically high number. If you had told most Americans two years ago as this pandemic was getting going that 900,000 Americans would die over the next few years, I think most people would not have believed it,” said Dr Ashish K Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health.
He lamented that most of the deaths had happened after the vaccine gained authorization.
“We got the medical science right. We failed on the social science. We failed on how to help people get vaccinated, to combat disinformation, to not politicize this,” Jha said. Read more…
