Two relatives hug during a funeral service for Lydia Nunez, who died of Covid-19, at the Metropolitan Baptist Church in Los Angeles
Credit: Marcio Jose Sanchez /AP
As the US stood on the brink of half a million dead from the coronavirus, President Joe Biden was due to mark the grim milestone with a moment of silence.
Mr Biden, who has made tackling Covid-19 a priority for his administration, and Jill Biden, the First Lady, planned to mark the 500,000th American death with a candle-lighting ceremony at the White House on Monday night.
The president will use "his own voice and platform to take a moment to remember the people whose lives have been lost, the families who are still suffering at what is still a very difficult moment in this country," said Jen Psaki, White House spokeswoman.
The most death toll in the US was 499,056, according to data from John Hopkins University.
A Covid-19 victim is transported from a hospital morgue in Baltimore, Maryland
Credit: ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS /AFP
"We’ve done worse than almost any other country, and we’re a highly developed rich country," Dr Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, said on Monday of the death toll.
When experts predicted it could reach 240,000, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases told ABC, “people were thinking we were being hyperbolic, and now here we are with a half a million deaths."
“It’s nothing like we have ever been through in the last 102 years, since the 1918 influenza pandemic. It’s something that is stunning when you look at the numbers, almost unbelievable, but it’s true."
"It’s so tough to just go back and try and, you know, do a metaphorical autopsy on how things went. It was just bad.”
US coronavirus deaths
The US has by far the highest death toll, with at least 498,901 lives lost, followed by Brazil with 246,504 fatalities. The UK, by comparison, has recorded more than 121,000 deaths from Covid-19.
It took four months for the US to reach the first 100,000 dead. The toll hit 200,000 deaths in September and 300,000 in December. Then it took just over a month to go from 300,000 to 400,000 and about two months to climb from 400,000 to the brink of 500,000.
The virus took a full year off the average life expectancy in the US, the biggest decline since World War Two.
However, experts were cautiously optimistic that the US might be over the worst. Covid-19 cases fell for the fifth straight week and deaths, a lagging indicator, are also beginning to ease.
More than 61 million people — some 15 per cent of the population — have received at least one shot of a vaccine in the US, with some 18 million getting the full two doses.
A drive-through mass vaccination site in Denver, Colorado
Credit: Michael Ciaglo /Getty Images North America
Mr Biden has made it a priority to get 100 million people vaccinated within the first 100 days of his administration.
Dr Fauci warned that Americans may still need masks in 2022 even as other measures to stop the virus’ spread become increasingly relaxed and more vaccines are administered, and they may also need a booster shot depending on how variants emerge.
He did not see major cause for concern with the new strains, believing the vaccines offered a good deal of protection against them.
Mr Biden said he did not want to give firm predictions of when the crisis will be curbed, but said that 600 million doses — enough to provide the two-dose regimen to most of the country — were expected to be ready by the end of July.
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