A white flag in memory of 29-year-old Jaqueline Lena Tardif is one of more than 670,000 covering 20 acres of DC’s National Mall in an art memorial for COVID-19 victims. Allison Bailey / Reuters
Think back to the start of the pandemic. Try to recall the first time you heard of the novel coronavirus or social distancing. How bad did you think it would get?
As of Tuesday, more than 800,000 Americans have now died from COVID-19, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. Americans are dying from the virus at a rate of roughly 1,500 per day. What’s more troubling, one medical expert at University of California, San Francisco, said, is that “it feels like most of the deaths were preventable and unnecessary.”
With safe and highly effective COVID vaccines widely available in the US, many unvaccinated Americans are essentially choosing a path toward preventable death. Unvaccinated Americans are roughly six times more likely to be diagnosed with COVID and 20 more times to die from it, according to multiple analyses.
And now, with a potentially even more transmissible Omicron variantbeginning to circulate, experts fear that rate could spike further as Americans endure yet another dark winter.