COVID-19 Has Now Claimed 800,000 American Lives

A day after passing 50 million COVID-19 cases, the United States has passed an even grimmer milestone - 800,000 deaths.

According to Johns Hopkins University, COVID-19 has claimed the lives of 800,266 Americans among 50,226,427 cases representing a mortality rate of 1.6%. It took 20 days to go from 775,000 to 800,000 deaths after taking 21 days to go from 750,000 to 775,000 deaths. If 25,000 people die of COVID-19 every 20 days, the United States will reach 1 million COVID deaths by May 23, 2022 - a week before Memorial Day. This, of course, assumes things don't get worse.

Unfortunately, a critical mass of the country have chosen death over liberty let alone life. As David Mack of BuzzFeed News put it today:

Now, with safe and highly effective COVID vaccines widely available in the US, many unvaccinated Americans are essentially choosing a path toward preventable death.

Unvaccinated Americans are roughly six times more likely to be diagnosed with COVID and 20 more times to die from it, according to multiple analyses. Another study from the Kaiser Family Foundation found that at least 90,000 people — mothers and sons, fathers and daughters, friends and strangers — died unnecessarily between June and September alone because they had not been vaccinated. Many more have died since.

“We still have people who don't believe the disease is real. We have people who don't believe the disease is real on their deathbed,” Benjamin said. “And we have people who continue to foster that misinformation.”

Vaccine hesitancy and refusal are phenomena that are present in countries around the world, but like many things in the US, they have been especially poisoned by politics. If you live in a county that voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 election, you’re much less likely to be vaccinated than residents in counties who voted for Joe Biden. Deaths are subsequently higher in Trump counties. In October, 25 out of every 100,000 residents in strongly Trump counties died from COVID, compared to just 7.8 per 100,000 in strongly Biden counties.

As long as this state of affairs prevails we will eventually hit a vaccine ceiling. While more than 200 million Americans are fully vaccinated nearly a third of our populace simply refuses to get vaccinated much less wear a mask. Sure we might get to 70% of the population being fully vaccinated. As it stands, 71% of the country is partially vaccinated. But let's remember that Canada got to that number after a sluggish start in mid-July. 

That was 5 months ago. How many Americans would still be alive today if more than 70% had at least partially vaccinated during the summer?

Alas many of us insist on learning the hard way if ever learning at all.