The pace of deaths slowed throughout summer 2020, then quickened throughout the fall and winter, and then slowed again this spring and summer. “Older people were so vulnerable.”Īfter the first known coronavirus death in the United States in February 2020, the virus’s death toll in this country reached 100,000 people in only three months. “Covid really made something visible that was already going on for older adults,” she said. Countless others have found themselves isolated. Some 75 percent of the 800,000 Covid-19 deaths have involved people 65 or older. Older people steered clear of crowded public gatherings and younger relatives stayed away, fearful of exposing those more vulnerable to the virus. Nearly two years later, those difficulties have persisted, whether in the form of a high death rate or isolation, which in many cases already existed but expanded significantly as the months wore on. “Early on, Covid was considered to be an older people’s problem,” she said. Naoko Muramatsu, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s School of Public Health, said that from the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, older people have suffered disproportionately.
It is not yet known how the Omicron variant, which continues to emerge in more states, might affect those trends in the coming weeks and months. The current uptick is being driven by the Delta variant. The last 100,000 deaths occurred in less than 11 weeks as the pace of death has picked up, moving faster than at any time other than last winter’s surge. More than 1,200 people in the United States are dying from Covid-19 each day.
It also comes at a tenuous moment in the pandemic: Cases are rising once again, hospitals in some parts of the country are stretched to their limits with Covid patients and the threat and uncertainties of a new variant loom.
The new death toll - the highest known number of any country - comes a year after vaccines against the coronavirus began rolling out in the United States. Mario Tama/Getty ImagesĬoronavirus deaths in the United States surpassed 800,000 on Wednesday, according to a New York Times database, as the pandemic neared the end of a second year and as known virus cases in this country rose above 50 million. A memorial at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles last month, honoring Los Angeles County residents who have died from Covid-19.
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