US COVID-19 Death Toll Tops 700,000

• Some experts believe that the current COVID-19 death count could already be greatly undercounted…

The United States reached another grim milestone on Friday, as the confirmed COVID-19 death toll topped 700,000, just over a year and a half into the pandemic, and despite the wide availability of vaccines.

The milestone, according to data from Johns Hopkins University, comes less than two weeks after the national death toll surpassed the estimated number of fatalities in the U.S. during the 1918 influenza pandemic.

Despite national COVID-19 metrics showing encouraging signs of decline, approximately 1,500 Americans are dying from the virus every day, according to federal data.

Read also: US To Lift Travel Ban For Vaccinated UK And EU Travellers

“Reaching 700,000 deaths is a tragic and completely avoidable milestone. We had the knowledge and the tools to prevent this from happening, and unfortunately politics, lack of urgency and mistrust in science got us here,” said John Brownstein, an epidemiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital.

To put it in perspective, the staggering number of deaths is greater than the number of Americans who were estimated to have died of cancer last year, one of the nation’s leading causes of death. It’s higher than the total number of American troops who have died in battle throughout the recent history of the country, and it is about the same as the population of Boston, Massachusetts.

Some experts believe that the current COVID-19 death count could already be greatly undercounted, due to inconsistent reporting by states and localities, and the exclusion of excess deaths, a measure of how many lives have been lost beyond what would be expected if the pandemic had not occurred.

The country’s four largest states — California, Texas, New York and Florida — all have recorded more than 50,000 deaths, close to a third of the overall total.

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