America Records One Million Covid-19 Deaths

The United States has eclipsed one million COVID-19 deaths, the White House announced Thursday, the first nation to reach the grim total during the pandemic that has dominated life for the past two years.

President Joe Biden paid his respects to the families of the one million Americans, telling grieving relatives that he knows ‘the pain of that black hole in your heart’.

The one million mark is a stark reminder of the staggering grief and loss caused by the pandemic even as the threat posed by the virus wanes in the minds of many people.

It represents about one death for every 327 Americans, or more than the entire population of San Francisco or Seattle.

According to some popular pandemic counters, like ones published by Johns Hopkins University and the New York Times, America is still a few thousand deaths away from one million, but will likely reach the mark in the coming days.

This is because different organizations use different means to gather a record data, leading to slightly different figures.

The mark is also reached as the virus has a resurgence, with both cases and deaths trending upwards once again after around three straight months of rapidly falling after the winter Omicron surge.

The U.S. is recording 86,834 cases a day, a 36 percent jump over the past week. Deaths from the virus have fallen 33 percent during that time, to 381 per day.

Biden said he acknowledged the ‘unrelenting’ pain of those who have lost loved ones during the pandemic, as the president marked the devastating milestone of one million deaths in the US.

He called on residents to ‘remain vigilant against this pandemic’ and said it was ‘critical’ for Congress to fund resources like testing, vaccines and treatments.