Coronavirus: US COVID-19 death toll tops 900,000

The death toll attributed to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic topped 900,000 nationwide on Friday afternoon.

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A tally from Johns Hopkins University showed that as of Friday afternoon, more than 900,500 people had died of COVID-19 across the U.S. The country reached the grim milestone less than two months after seeing 800,000 deaths from the viral infection, as the highly transmissible omicron variant began circulating in the country.

“It is an astronomically high number,” Dr. Ashish K. Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, told The Associated Press. “If you had told most Americans two years ago as this pandemic was getting going that 900,000 Americans would die over the next few years, I think most people would not have believed it.”

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The deaths come as health officials continue to press Americans to get vaccinated against COVID-19, saying that the shots protect well against severe illness and death from the virus. As of Thursday morning, just 68% of Americans eligible for vaccines were fully vaccinated, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Jha told the AP that officials “failed on the social science,” explaining the high number of Americans who continue to refuse the shots.

“We got the medical science right,” he said. “We failed on how to help people get vaccinated, to combat disinformation, to not politicize this.”

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At a news conference Wednesday, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, head of the CDC, said seven-day average daily deaths attributed to COVID-19 rose about 4% from the previous week, to 2,300 per day. The number of infections and hospital admissions have been trending down, however, Walensky noted that hospitalizations “remain high, stretching our health care capacity and workforce to its limits in some areas of the country.”

She reiterated calls for unvaccinated people to get their shots, pointing to data from the week ending Dec. 4 that showed that unvaccinated people were at 14 times higher risk of dying from COVID-19 than those who are fully vaccinated.

“For those who were boosted, the average of weekly deaths was 0.1 per 100,000 people, meaning that unvaccinated individuals were 97 times more likely to die compared to those who were boosted,” she said, adding that data showed “that vaccination and boosting continue to protect against severe illness and hospitalization, even during the omicron surge.”

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The omicron variant of COVID-19 was first detected in the U.S. on Dec. 1 and has since become the dominant variant linked to nearly all new coronavirus infections nationwide, according to the CDC.

Officials have confirmed more than 76.2 million COVID-19 infections and reported over 900,500 deaths nationwide, according to numbers compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

More than 390 million COVID-19 cases have been reported worldwide, resulting in 5.7 million deaths, according to the university.

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