Today’s grim milestone comes on the heels of some of the deadliest months of the pandemic. Following a fall and winter surge in Covid-19 cases, there were 81,000 reported deaths in December and 95,000 in January, both far surpassing April’s peak of just over 60,000. At the same time, U.S. health officials are racing to increase the pace of Covid-19 vaccinations across the country.
Horrible landmark
Although the virus has been with us for more than a year, the scale of the death toll is hard to fathom.
When U.S. health officials gave early estimates of hundreds of thousands of deaths last spring, “people thought that we were being hyperbolic about that, and clearly that was not the case. This is a horrible landmark that we’ve now reached,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the White House’s chief medical advisor, told CBS News on Monday.
Nearly as many Americans have now died from Covid-19 as were killed in World War I and II, combined. The U.S. death toll represents a population roughly the size of Atlanta or Kansas City, Missouri.
“Even when you hear about half a million people dying, it sounds like a very large number, but it’s hard to put it into perspective,” said Cynthia Cox, a vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit focused on national health issues. “It’s hard for people to hear these big numbers and put faces to them.”
One reason for that is the nature of how these deaths have often occurred, in isolation and away from loved ones.
“The thing that has been different about Covid from other mass casualty events is the lack of video or personal connection at the time of death,” said Cox. “Covid wards are so sealed off for safety reasons that we don’t have news cameras in there to show us what this really looks like. We hear a lot of big numbers but we don’t get that personal connection unless we know someone.”
David Kessler, a Los Angeles-based grief expert and author who has been running an online support group for those who have lost someone to Covid, said that 500,000 deaths is a number “that the mind doesn’t want to comprehend.”
“A number like that makes the world dangerous, and we’d rather not live in a dangerous world,” he said.
Searching for a reference point, Kessler compared the Covid death toll to the two Boeing 737 Max airplane crashes in 2018 and 2019 that killed a total of 346 people.
“Think about how many 737 Maxes went down, how much news we had and the visuals we had,” he said. “You don’t realize that 500,000 people is the equivalent of almost 3,000 airplanes going down. Eight would have gone down yesterday. Can you imagine if eight planes crashed every day?”
A leading cause of death in the U.S.
The Covid-19 death toll puts the disease firmly among the leading causes of death in the United States. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, only heart disease and cancer killed more than 500,000 people in a year in 2019, the most recent annual figures available. When the daily death toll peaked in January, Cox found in a Kaiser Family Foundation analysis that Covid was killing more people per day than any other cause.
Covid-19, though, is a single illness, and not a group of illnesses that make up the CDC’s broader cause of death categories like heart disease and cancer. The Covid-19 numbers are even more stark in comparison with other specific illnesses like lung cancer, which killed 140,000 Americans in 2019, Alzheimer’s disease, which killed 121,000, or breast cancer, which killed 43,000.
Broken out this way, Cox said, the Covid death toll “really far exceeds any other single disease.”
