Manama, Oct. 3 (BNA) The US death toll from the novel coronavirus (Covid-19) passed 700,000 late Friday – more than the population of Boston. The last 100,000 deaths occurred at a time when vaccines — which greatly prevent deaths, hospitalizations, and serious illness — were available to any American over the age of 12.
This achievement is deeply disappointing to clinicians, public health officials and the American public, who have watched the epidemic that began to decline earlier in the summer take a dark turn. The Associated Press reported that tens of millions of Americans refused to receive the vaccination, allowing the highly contagious delta variant to spread across the country and send the death toll from 600,000 to 700,000 in 3 and a half months.
Florida has suffered by far the most deaths of any state during that time, with the virus killing about 17,000 residents since mid-June. Texas came second, with 13,000 deaths. The two countries account for 15 percent of the country’s population, but more than 30 percent of the nation’s deaths since the nation crossed the 600,000 threshold.
It’s safe to say that at least 70,000 of the last 100,000 deaths were of unvaccinated people, said Dr. David Dowdy, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who analyzed the country’s reported data. Of the vaccinated people who died of sudden infection, most of them contracted the virus from a non-vaccinated person, he said.
“If we had been more effective in vaccinating, I think it’s fair to say, we could have prevented 90 percent of those deaths” since mid-June, Doody said.
“It’s not just a number on the screen,” Doody said. “It’s tens of thousands of these tragic stories of people whose families have lost someone who meant the world to them.”
Danny Baker is one of them.
The 28-year-old seed carrier from Riley, Kansas, contracted COVID-19 over the summer, spent more than a month in the hospital and died on September 14. He left behind a wife and a 7-month-old baby.
“This thing took a 28-year-old, 300-pound guy, and put him down like it was nothing,” his father, J.D. Baker, 56, said. Milford, KS. “So if young people think that they are still… protected by their youth and strength, then there is no longer any.”
In the early days of the pandemic, Danny Baker, who was a championship trap shooter in high school and loved hunting and fishing, insisted he would be first in line for a vaccine, his mother recalls.
But once vaccines opened up to his age group, the United States recommended halting use of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine to investigate reports of rare but serious blood clots. The news, as well as information circulating online, frightened him that the vaccine could harm fertility, although medical experts say there is no biological reason for the injection to affect fertility.
His wife was also breastfeeding, so they decided to wait. Health experts now say that breastfeeding mothers should get the vaccine to protect them, and that it may offer some protection to their babies through antibodies passed into breast milk.
“There is a lot of misunderstanding about the vaccine,” said his wife, Opria Baker, a 27-year-old obstetrics and gynecologist, adding that her husband’s death inspired a Facebook page and at least 100 people to get vaccinated. “It’s not that we won’t get it. We just haven’t got it yet.”
When deaths topped 600,000 in mid-June, vaccinations were already reducing the number of cases, restrictions were lifted and people looked forward to life returning to normal over the summer. The daily death rate in the United States has fallen to about 340, from a high of more than 3,000 cases in mid-January. Shortly thereafter, health officials declared it a non-vaccinated pandemic.
But with the spread of the delta variant in the country, the number of cases and deaths has soared—particularly among unvaccinated people and young adults, with hospitals across the country reporting significant increases in admissions and deaths among people under 65. They also report significant infections and deaths, albeit Far lower rates, prompting efforts to provide booster shots to vulnerable Americans.
Now, the average daily death rate is about 1,900 per day. Cases have begun to decline from their highest levels in September, but there are fears the situation could get worse in the winter months when cold weather drives people indoors.
In a statement Saturday, President Joe Biden lamented what he called the “painful milestone” of the 700,000 deaths from COVID-19 and said, “We must not be numb with grief.”
He renewed his offer of vaccination, saying that the country had “made extraordinary progress” against the coronavirus over the past eight months thanks to vaccinations.
“It could save your life and the lives of those you love,” Biden said. “It will help us beat COVID-19 and move forward, together, as one nation.”
Nearly 65% of Americans have had at least one dose of the vaccine, while about 56% have been fully vaccinated, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But millions either refuse or remain on the sidelines due to fear, disinformation and political beliefs. Healthcare workers have reported being threatened by patients and members of the community who don’t believe COVID-19 is real.
The first known deaths from the virus in the United States were in early February 2020. It took four months to reach the first 100,000 deaths. During the catastrophe’s deadliest phase, in the winter of 2020-21, it took just over a month to go from 300,000 to 400,000 deaths.
The US reached 500,000 deaths in mid-February, when the country was still in the midst of a winter wave and vaccines were only available to a limited number of people. The death toll reached about 570,000 in April when every American adult became eligible to shoot.
Dr. George Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, said: “I remember when we broke the 100,000 death mark, people shook their heads and said ‘Oh, my God.’” And then we said, ‘Are we going to reach 200,000?’ And then we kept looking at the 100,000 death mark. Finally, we surpassed the estimated US death toll of 675,000 from the 1918-19 influenza pandemic.
“And we’re not done yet,” Benjamin said.
Deaths during the delta’s relentless increase were in hot spots in the south. Nearly 79 out of every 100,000 people in Florida have died of COVID since mid-June, the highest rate in the country.
Amanda Alexander, a COVID-19 intensive care unit nurse at Augusta University Medical Center in Georgia, said Thursday that she has died a patient in each of her previous three shifts.
“I watched him die at the age of twenty. I have watched children in their thirties, in their forties,” without pre-existing circumstances that would put them at greater risk, she said. Ninety-nine percent of our patients are unvaccinated. This is very frustrating because facts don’t lie and we see them every day.”
MI