(Washington) The United States, officially the country most bereaved by the pandemic, exceeded 800,000 deaths from COVID-19 on Tuesday, according to the report from Johns Hopkins University.
This number is greater than the population of entire US states, such as North Dakota or Alaska.
Around 450,000 deaths occurred in 2021, despite highly effective vaccines having started to be authorized from December 2020, and widely available in the spring of 2021.
The United States currently records an average of 1,150 COVID-19 deaths per day, according to figures from the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC).
The vast majority of deaths are unvaccinated people.
About 72% of the U.S. population has received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, less than many countries.
Congressional leaders observed a minute’s silence on Tuesday evening in honor of the lives lost.
“We will remember that 800,000 loved ones have not made it this far: a lost father or grandfather, a mother or grandmother, a friend, a familiar face in the neighborhood,” said the majority leader Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer in a statement. “We all know someone who has died of this disease. ”
This sad stage comes in the middle of the fifth wave of contamination in the United States, linked like the previous one to the Delta variant.
But experts are now worried about the Omicron variant, which is starting to spread in the country even if it only represents about 3% of new cases at the moment.
Omicron is spreading at an unprecedented rate on the planet, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned on Tuesday.
The United States is the most bereaved country in the world, according to official figures released by the authorities, ahead of Brazil, India, Mexico and Russia.
The pandemic has killed at least 5.3 million people worldwide since the end of 2019, according to a report established by AFP from official sources on Tuesday.
But according to the WHO, the real toll could be two to three times higher.