Profound means unfathomable, like the deepest part of the ocean. It’s a term we reserve for huge events we find hard to grasp. San Jose, California is America’s 10th largest city and home to a million people. But we would have difficulty imagining all those people in our minds. Or comprehending a million US COVID deaths for that matter.
It’s For Real: US COVID Deaths Exceed a Million
CNBC lead with the story on May 4, 2022, and we picked up the ball there. It described the milestone as “A once unthinkable scale of loss. Even for the country with the world’s highest recorded toll from the virus”. How many more people are walking around with their hopes, even their lives shattered?
Christopher Murray leads the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at University of Washington’s School of Medicine. He says “This milestone is appalling … this is far from over”.
Robert Murphy is executive director of Havey Institute for Global Health at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. He told CNBC “Everybody really thought we were going to vaccinate our way out of this. But then we had people that wouldn’t even take the damn vaccine.”
Where Do We Go from Here With a Million Deaths?
Where should we go from here with a million US deaths from COVID? Do we wring our hands and do nothing about it, or must we change something. We do know 80% of those fatalities were likely unvaccinated people, according to US Centers for Disease Control CDC.
This is a question of rational science, not emotive response. We have laid the medical evidence out on these pages time and again. Vaccines and common sense might have avoided 800,000 deaths, slightly less than the population of San Francisco. Does this matter? It’s in each of our hands what happens next.
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