Coronavirus deaths top 100,000 in United States. ‘Too big for us to comprehend’
Coronavirus has killed more than 100,000 people in the United States, Johns Hopkins University reported Wednesday.
There have been 5.6 million confirmed cases of the COVID-19 virus worldwide, with more than 353,000 deaths, according to the university. The United States leads the world in deaths, with the United Kingdom following at more than 37,000 deaths.
The United States has had more than 1.6 million confirmed cases, and nearly 15 million in the U.S. have been tested for the COVID-19 virus, Johns Hopkins University reported.
More than 77,000 people have been hospitalized with coronavirus in New York, where more than 29,000 have died, according to the university.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that the 2019-20 seasonal flu has killed from 24,000 to 62,000 people nationally. A 2009 swine flu pandemic killed more than 12,000 people in the United States.
The CDC on Wednesday listed a provisional coronavirus death toll of 76,874 for the United States as based on death certificate data, which the agency notes often are delayed and can lag up to two weeks behind actual death tolls in a pandemic.
On Sunday, The New York Times published a front page listing 1,000 names and one-line obituaries for coronavirus victims, calling it “an incalculable loss.”
But newspapers and television stations across the nation mostly focused on stories about people celebrating Memorial Day weekend and the easing of stay-home orders by crowding beaches, restaurants and bars.
“I don’t think we’re taking this in,” said David Kessler, an author of six books on grief, reported the Los Angeles Times.
“It’s easy to digest a statistic. It is not easy to digest 12 plane crashes a day,” Kessler said, according to the publication. “Especially when there are no visuals. We aren’t seeing 90,000 caskets. That kind of stuff would shock us. Maybe this is too big for us to comprehend.”
The coronavirus outbreak began in December in Wuhan, China, possibly after the virus passed to humans from bats and pangolins, an Asian scaly anteater, McClatchy News reported.
COVID-19, named because it’s a new type of coronavirus first seen in 2019, comes from a family of viruses responsible for the common cold, SARS, MERS and other ailments.
The World Health Organization has declared coronavirus a global pandemic. In the United States, President Donald Trump has declared a national emergency.
This story was originally published May 27, 2020 at 2:47 PM with the headline "Coronavirus deaths top 100,000 in United States. ‘Too big for us to comprehend’."