Friday’s sombre milestone comes 13 months into a US vaccination drive that has been beset by misinformation and political strife, though the jabs have proved safe and highly effective at preventing serious illness and death.
“It is an astronomically high number,” said Dr Ashish K Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health. “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.”While the brutal Omicron wave is easing its grip on the US – with new cases of COVID-19 falling in 49 of the country’s 50 states – deaths are running at more than 2,400 per day on average, the highest level since the last northern winter.
The US has the highest reported coronavirus death toll of any country in the world, and even then, the actual number of lives lost directly or indirectly to COVID-19 is thought to be significantly higher. Experts believe some COVID-19 deaths have been misattributed to other conditions, while some Americans are thought to have died of chronic illnesses such as heart disease and diabetes because they were unable or unwilling to obtain treatment during the crisis.
“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.