U.S. Surpasses a Million COVID Deaths, and the Pandemic Isn't Over
America has exceeded the grim milestone of a million lives lost to COVID-19. And political leaders are pretending the pandemic is done.
From NBC News:
The U.S. on Wednesday surpassed 1 million Covid-19 deaths, according to data compiled by NBC News — a once unthinkable scale of loss even for the country with the world's highest recorded toll from the virus.
The number — equivalent to the population of San Jose, California, the 10th largest city in the U.S. — was reached at stunning speed: 27 months after the country confirmed its first case of the virus.
Those lives are important. The pain of their loved ones matters. We must not forget their anguish and suffering.
And contrary to the denial from politicians, the pandemic is far from over. According to the New York Times, “cases are rising in nearly every corner of the United States.”
From the very beginning, the U.S. government’s response to the pandemic has been criminally negligent. As I wrote recently, Trump, Biden, and their respective parties have prioritized money over lives, guaranteeing that billionaires mint money as the working class suffers and dies.
This callous capitalism has condemned the disabled, immunocompromised, and other vulnerable populations to preventable sickness and death. And it has ignored the very real and debilitating effects of long COVID.
And lest anyone claim this is a “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” the Washington Post reports that “the pandemic’s toll is no longer falling almost exclusively on those who chose not to or could not get shots, with vaccine protection waning over time and the elderly and immunocompromised — who are at greatest risk of succumbing to covid-19, even if vaccinated — having a harder time dodging increasingly contagious strains.”
And despite it all, Democrats and Republicans continue to force people to fend for themselves:
This pandemic has been, and continues to be, a tragedy — and political travesty — at every level.