U.S. death toll from COVID-19 hits 900,000, propelled by Omicron
The Associated Press · Posted: Feb 04, 2022 8:00 AM ET | Last Updated: 8 hours ago
A product stall filled with free N95 respirator masks, provided by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, sits outside a pharmacy at this Jackson, Miss., Kroger grocery store on Feb. 2. (/Rogelio V. Solis/The Associated Press)
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Propelled in part by the wildly contagious Omicron variant, the U.S. 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, N.C.
"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 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. "Those are the places where we have failed as America."
Just 64 per cent of the U.S. population is fully vaccinated, or about 212 million Americans, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"We have underestimated our enemy here, and we have under-prepared to protect ourselves," said Dr. Joshua M. Sharfstein, a public health professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. "We've learned a tremendous amount of humility in the face of a lethal and contagious respiratory virus."
Prediction of 1 million deaths by April
Nor is COVID-19 finished with the United States: Jha predicted the U.S. will reach 1 million deaths by April.
"I think it's important for us not to be numbed. Each one of those numbers is someone," said the Rev. Gina Anderson-Cloud, senior pastor of Fredericksburg United Methodist Church in Virginia. "Those are mothers, fathers, children, our elders."
The milestone came as Omicron is loosening its grip on the country.
New cases per day day have plunged by almost half since mid-January, when they hit a record-shattering peak of more than 800,000.
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Cases have been declining in 49 out of 50 states over the past two weeks, by Johns Hopkins' count, and the 50th state, Maine, reported that confirmed infections are falling there, too, dropping sharply over the past week.
Also, the number of Americans in the hospital with COVID-19 has declined 15 per cent since mid-January to about 124,000.
But deaths are still running high at more than 2,400 per day on average, the most since last winter. And they are on the rise in at least 35 states, reflecting the lag time between when victims become infected and when they succumb.
While public health officials have expressed hope that the worst of Omicron is coming to an end, they caution that things could still go bad again and dangerous new variants could emerge.
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