U.S. Surpasses 500,000 COVID Deaths After Yearlong Battle With Pandemic

CNBC reports that more than 500,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 in the year since the virus was first detected in the United States, according to data from Johns Hopkins University (JHU). Recent months have been among the worst of the crisis, with 81,000 reported deaths in December and 95,000 in January, exceeding the peak of just over 60,000 in April. Concurrently, U.S. health officials are scrambling to ramp up COVID-19 vaccinations nationwide. American fatalities from the virus are almost as many as those in World Wars I and II combined. Cynthia Cox at the Kaiser Family Foundation said the staggering death toll is hard for many people to comprehend, partly because so many deaths have happened in isolation and away from loved ones. Those numbers establish COVID-19 as a leading cause of death in the U.S., while the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the disease knocked one year off U.S. life expectancy in the first half of 2020. Although JHU data indicates that average daily COVID deaths have fallen from more than 3,300 in mid-January to just below 1,900, the University of Washington's Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation has forecast 571,000 to 616,000 total fatalities by June 1.