600,000 Americans Have Died of COVID-19 Despite Recent Good News

COVID-19 has now claimed the lives of 600,000 Americans. According to Johns Hopkins University, 600,012 Americans have died of COVID-19 out of 33,477,016 cases representing a mortality rate of 1.8%.

Of course, the recent news regarding COVID-19 has largely been positive. Vermont became the first state to partially vaccinate 80% of its population. A dozen other states plus D.C. (Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Hawaii, California, Maryland and New Mexico) have at least 70% of their populaces partially vaccinated. While we might not get to President Biden's goal of 70% of Americans being partially vaccinated by the Fourth of July we could get close. As of this writing, we are at 62%. Overall, 43.7% of Americans are fully vaccinated. 

The number of overall cases are also significantly down. Today, we recorded 12,710 new COVID-19 cases which is very near Dr. Fauci's 10,000 cases a day or fewer threshold. To look at it another way, the U.S. passed 33 million COVID-19 cases on May 19th. It took 25 days to get from 32 million to 33 million cases. It has been 27 days since we hit the 33 million case mark and fewer than a half million new cases have been recorded. We will still add millions of COVID-19 cases but it will take a lot longer to get there. Hospitalizations are also down with fewer than 20,000 Americans admitted due to COVID-19.

Cases are down, hospitalizations are down and so are deaths. We went from 300,000 to 400,000 deaths in 36 days. It took 34 days to get from 400,000 to 500,000 deaths. By comparison, it took 113 days to get from 500,000 deaths to 600,000 deaths. That's more than thrice as long.

But that is of cold comfort to the families of those who lost loved ones due to COVID-19 over those past 16 weeks. For 100,000 Americans to die in less than four months due to any single cause is a great deal to bear. It's all the more difficult considering the wider availability of vaccines and therapeutics. Sadly, a critical mass of the population is hesitant about vaccines and because of it we will eventually surpass the 675,000 Americans who died during the Spanish Flu epidemic of more than a century ago and once again history will have taught us nothing despite the best efforts of some.