'Tragic Milestone': 1 Million American Lives Lost to COVID-19

It's a number many Americans have grimly expected but may still find hard to comprehend: Over one million of their fellow citizens killed by COVID-19.

"Today, we mark a tragic milestone: one million American lives lost to COVID-19," President Joe Biden remarked in a speech posted Thursday morning on the White House website. "One million empty chairs around the dinner table. Each an irreplaceable loss. Each leaving behind a family, a community, and a Nation forever changed because of this pandemic. Jill and I pray for each of them."

Biden ordered that U.S. flags be flown at half-staff Thursday in honor of those lost.

"As a Nation, we must not grow numb to such sorrow," Biden said. "To heal, we must remember. We must remain vigilant against this pandemic and do everything we can to save as many lives as possible."

According to data compiled by NBC News, the U.S. passed the 1 million mark earlier this month, reaching a number equivalent to the population size of San Jose, California, the 10th largest city in the U.S. As of Wednesday, COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. had reached 1,002,848, according to data.

Those who lost their lives to COVID were mostly old; disproportionately low income, Black or Hispanic; and overwhelmingly unvaccinated. People who did not get the shot were 53.2 times more likely to die than fully vaccinated and boosted people, the Washington Post notes.

Although COVID-related deaths have slowed in recent weeks, an average of 481 people were dying on a daily basis as of Wednesday. This represents a two-week increase of roughly 41 percent, according to an analysis by NBC News. And according to Dr. Christopher Murray, who heads the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington School of Medicine, the death toll will continue to grow.

“This is far from over,” Murray says.

Is a lack of communication the cause?

The first fatal case reported to the CDC occurred in Washington state on Feb. 29, 2020, although more recent investigations now suggest that the first American deaths may have occurred in early January of that year.

For many experts who've tracked COVID-19's relentless march through the population, it didn't have to be that way.

Dr. William Schaffner is medical director of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases. He points to mixed messages and incomplete data that kept many Americans from taking steps that might have saved lives.

Communication is crucial in a pandemic, Schaffner says, and the United States failed to issue clear explanations and instructions as COVID surged across the nation.

"It became very political," Schaffner adds. "In the very same press conference, you would have political leaders saying one thing and then public health leaders three minutes later saying something 180 degrees different. And that went on and on, causing an incredible amount of

confusion and misinformation with which we're still dealing today."

In the end, management of the crisis devolved to individual states, Schaffner notes. That set up a scenario resembling an out-of-sync orchestra.

In nations that fared better against SARS-CoV-2, "there's a [political] conductor, we're all playing off the same sheet of music"; something that Schaffner believes did not happen in the United States.

"Countries that had a national policy did better than those who fractionated their leadership," he explains.

Science was slow to catch up

Scientists weren't entirely blameless, either, Schaffner adds.

"We epidemiologists were slow to realize that COVID was different from those other coronaviruses that jumped species to the human population," he says. "They were hard to transmit, and we thought initially that COVID was similar. It turned out to be a very different virus. It was transmitted very readily. It had a lot of asymptomatic infection and spread very, very rapidly. It took us epidemiologists too long to recognize that."

Another expert believes that the rapid advent and deployment of effective COVID-19 vaccines in 2021 could have been an opportunity to slow fatal COVID cases.

However, "the most significant aspect of the death toll is the fact that more deaths occurred after the vaccine was available than before," according to Dr. Amesh Adalja, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, in Baltimore.

Note: The NCHS uses a classification system that identifies the underlying cause of death among other reported conditions.
Source: National Center for Health Statistics

Vaccines are still the greatest protection against COVID

"An extremely high proportion of deaths are vaccine-preventable and were, in effect, chosen or willful because people turned away from the vaccines and bought into fallacious misinformation and conspiracy theories," Adalja shares.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, Chief Medical Advisor to the President of United States, hopes this milestone will "call attention" to the risks unvaccinated people face and prompt them to consider getting vaccinated.

“If you look at the difference in hospitalization and death, between vaccinated and unvaccinated, you know this number screams out to us why we should be getting more people vaccinated,” Fauci says.

Find out more about COVID-19 at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.