The U.S. death toll from COVID-19 reached 1 million on Tuesday, according to Johns Hopkins University. Other organizations compiling the figures said the U.S. had already eclipsed the devastating milestone, up to a week ago. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics said by its calculations the U.S. death toll hit 1 million on Monday. Last week, President Joe Biden marked the approaching milestone, saying “One million empty chairs around the dinner table. Each an irreplaceable loss. Each leaving behind a family, a community, and a nation forever changed because of this pandemic,” he said. “As a nation, we must not grow numb to such sorrow. To heal, we must remember. We must remain vigilant against this pandemic and do everything we can to save as many lives as possible, as we have with more testing, vaccines, and treatments than ever before.” To put the staggering death toll from the pandemic into perspective, one million deaths is like seeing the population of San Jose, California, the nation’s 10th largest city, wiped out, or roughly equal to the number of Americans who died in the Civil War and World War II combined. Dr. Anthony Fauci told NPR hitting the one million figure is “terrible—horrible.” “To have that many people die of a transmissible disease in a two-year period—it is very sobering, and very sad and tragic.”
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