Members of congress participate in a moment of silence for the 500,000 American lives lost to Covid-19 on the steps of the US Capitol in Washington, DC on Tuesday, February 23 2021.Picture: BLOOMBERG/SARAH SILBIGER
In late March 2020 two of the US federal government’s top health experts, doctors Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, delivered a stark assessmentEven with lockdowns and social distancing, they warned during a public briefing of the coronavirus task force, between 100,000 and 240,000 people may die before the virus waned or was vanquished.
It was an eye-popping number at the time — there had been only about a dozen reported Covid deaths on US soil, and the president had dismissed the coronavirus as nothing more serious than seasonal flu. The announcement seemed hyperbolic and perhaps calculated to shock a still-complacent public into accepting that business and school closures were truly necessary.
This was just one way Americans underestimated the virus, and it wasn’t the last. The cost turned out to be much higher than most could have even imagined. Earlier this week the official US death toll for Covid-19surpassed 500,000 people — more than any other country — and is still rising every day, though happily at a slower pace than last month.
It’s a staggering loss of life by any measure, the equivalent of the entire city of Miami wiped out, plus a good chunk of neighbouring Miami Beach. It’s also probably an undercount, given the documented underreporting of Covid deaths in several jurisdictions.by a full year in the first half of 2020, from 78.8 years to 77.8 years, and worse still for black and Latino Americans. The figure may rebound next year after most Americans are vaccinated. But that’s another thing we can’t predict.
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