900,000 Americans have died of COVID in 2 years of the global pandemic [View all]

[L. Coyote]

Source: NPR

The U.S. has crossed yet another tragic landmark in the ongoing battle against COVID-19. On Friday, the country surpassed 900,000 deaths from the disease, two years after the first COVID-19 cluster was reported in Wuhan, China. Public health experts say coming close to the 1 million death mark from the virus is "inevitable."

"It's absolutely staggering," said Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, which has tracked the number of COVID-19 deaths during the pandemic. "It's unreal, frankly. And what makes it an even ... greater heartbreak — as if the loss of 900,000 souls weren't enough of a heartbreak — is the fact that it's probably an undercount of the number of people that we've lost."

University of Texas at Austin professor and epidemiologist Lauren Ancel Meyers said the "horrible milestone" didn't have to happen. "It was not inevitable. There are things that we could have done and should have done ... to protect those who were most vulnerable." she said. "It's a very sad day."

Read more: https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2022/02/04/1078100069/covid19-deaths-us

---

Link to tweet