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Just a few months into the COVID-19 pandemic, former President Donald Trump made a prediction.
“Look, we’re going to lose anywhere from 75,000, 80,000 to 100,000 people,” Trump said in May 2020 when the death toll stood at about 67,000. “That’s a horrible thing.”
Later that same month, when the U.S. death toll crossed 100,000, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a statement that “reaching the milestone of 100,000 persons lost in such a short timeframe is a sobering development and a heart-breaking reminder of the horrible toll of this unprecedented pandemic.”
But coronavirus deaths didn’t stop there. When the U.S. marked 500,000 deaths from COVID-19 in February 2021, leading infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci said that “if you look back historically, we’ve done worse than most any other country, and we’re a highly developed rich country.”
Now the death toll stands at about 999,600, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. In the span of just three months, the U.S. has added close to 100,000 deaths from COVID-19, which now stands at nearly 10 times the highest end of Trump’s prediction – an unfathomable measure of loss for the country. It means that the pandemic has killed approximately 1 in 330 Americans.
“As a nation, we must not grow numb to such sorrow. To heal, we must remember,” President Joe Biden said in a statement on Thursday marking the grim milestone. “In remembrance, let us draw strength from each other as fellow Americans. For while we have been humbled, we never give up.”
The development comes as mitigation strategies have fallen by the wayside for many, despite increasing infections and hospitalizations as a new omicron subvariant spreads. Calls to renew mask-wearing have largely landed on deaf ears as much of the country’s attention has shifted to worries over the economy, abortion access and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Further COVID-19 funding from Congress has proven difficult for the Biden administration to secure, even as it warns of a potential shortage of vaccines later this year without more money.
But White House officials are insisting that the U.S. has entered into a different phase of the pandemic while simultaneously predicting future coronavirus surges that could result in 100 million more coronavirus infections.
“We’re looking at a range of models, both internal and external models, and what they’re predicting is that if we don’t get ahead of this thing, we’re going to have a lot of waning immunity,” White House COVID-19 response coordinator Ashish Jha said last week. “This virus continues to evolve, and we may see a pretty sizable wave of infections, hospitalizations and deaths this fall and winter.”
It’s a delicate balance to try to strike at a time when the federal government has reduced its coronavirus messaging to the public. The last press briefing from the White House COVID-19 response team, for example, was over a month ago.
The U.S. has many questions to grapple with as it tries to move forward with the pandemic. One of the most important things to address is how to position COVID-19 in the spectrum of public health issues in the country, according to David Dowdy, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
“It’s challenging to find that balance. You don’t want to portray this as a disease that is as scary as it was when it first emerged, but you also don’t want to give the impression that the pandemic is over,” Dowdy says. “And most people want one of those two kind of black or white stories, not something that’s kind of messy and in between.”
Cartoons on the Coronavirus
True Death Toll Far Exceeds 1 Million
The U.S. is soon to report a death toll that will be larger than the populations of San Francisco, Seattle or Boston. But experts agree that it is not the full picture.
“We’ve already had far more than a million deaths due to COVID,” Dowdy says.
In fact, the U.S. could have crossed that number last year. The University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation published estimates of excess deaths during the first two years of the pandemic and found that between the start of 2020 and end of 2021, the U.S. had over 1.1 million deaths from COVID-19.
The number includes deaths associated with COVID-19 either directly due to the disease or indirectly due to the effects of the pandemic, such as overwhelmed health care systems preventing treatments for other issues.
It’s a staggering toll for a wealthy country that has had widespread access to COVID-19 vaccines and treatments. But it is also a situation where politics infiltrated public health, dividing the country over measures like mask-wearing and vaccination.
Dowdy notes that societies with a lot of trust in their governments have had fewer COVID-19 deaths than countries with low trust in government.
“This really has become not just a public health disease, but a political disease,” Dowdy says.
For example, 92% of Democrats report being vaccinated against COVID-19 compared to 55% of Republicans as of April, according to polling from the Kaiser Family Foundation. While 37% of Republicans report they definitely won’t get the shots, just 3% of Democrats share the same sentiment.
COVID-19 and Other Pandemics
As the U.S. tries to understand what its future with COVID-19 will look like, examining previous pandemics can offer lessons for the next one.
There are some similarities across pandemics. Unfortunately, many new diseases come with stigma. HIV/AIDS, a pandemic that started in 1981 and is estimated to have killed about 35 million people, marginalized gay men who were accused of spreading a “gay cancer.” Almost a million people still die of HIV/AIDS each year.
When COVID-19 emerged from China, Trump used disparaging and sometimes starkly racial terms to describe the virus.
“This is a continuum of this horrible stigmatization of patients,” says Jim Harris, a historian at Ohio State University who studies pandemics. “So that’s a lesson of history that we apparently did not learn.” However, he adds that society has likely gotten slightly better about it.
Other similarities include mitigation strategies like quarantine and masking.
“The practice of quarantine literally dates back to the plague years, and the very word comes from the Italian word for 40 days, which was the duration during which passengers and ships were held in quarantine where they were led into European ports to prevent plague,” Harris says.
Masking was also used during the 1918 flu pandemic, and some cities even implemented mask mandates. He adds that, similar to today, the mask mandates sparked outcry from anti-maskers.
“Masking, although not ubiquitous like it was today, was used irregularly in certain parts of the country in 1918 to stop the spread of flu,” Harris says.
But COVID-19 stands out among other pandemics for a few reasons. For one, it’s a high death toll despite advances in modern medicine, including a vaccine that was developed in record time.
“The numbers are horrific and shocking,” Harris says. “The thought that we would pass a million COVID deaths – it just blows my mind as a historian of pandemics.”
Additionally, society functions much differently now than during early pandemics. The ability to travel far distances in a short span of time certainly gave the airborne virus a leg up in establishing itself across the globe.
“What’s different about 21st century pandemics is you can get an airplane in Hong Kong and be in Toronto in half a day,” Harris says.
Not to mention that the COVID-19 pandemic is very much ongoing. Even in the U.S., close to 90,000 new infections are being reported on average each day, and experts believe that to be a significant undercount as many people use at-home tests that don’t get reported to health departments.
And officials also stress that even if the U.S. says it has entered a different phase of the pandemic, the global picture is different.
“We live in a globally interconnected world,” Maria Van Kerkhove of the World Health Organization said at a press conference last week. “So while some countries may have been able to end the emergency of this pandemic, in the sense that they can reduce morbidity, mortality, we don’t see that in all countries worldwide. So we need to continue to fight this at a global level.”