The U.S. is just days away from seeing 900,000 deaths due to COVID-19, and a million deaths are on the horizon, public health experts said this weekend.
As of late Sunday afternoon, 884,223 people in the country had died of COVID-19, according to Johns Hopkins University data, with 74.3 million infected.
Death tolls during the current COVID-19 surge fueled by the omicron variant of the novel coronavirus are surpassing the average daily tolls from a few months ago, when the delta variant was dominating the pandemic.
“That will cause a lot of soul searching,” University of California, Irvine public health professor Andrew Noymer told USA Today of the inevitability of a million deaths. “There will be a lot of discussion about what we could have done differently, how many of the deaths were preventable.”
Deaths in the U.S. from COVID-19 have topped 2,100 a day, the highest in nearly a year, The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday. Two months ago, before omicron was detected, the seven-day average for newly reported deaths was about 1,000 less than the 2,191 reached last Monday.
While omicron appears to cause milder illness than other variants, especially delta, the sheer number of omicron patients, especially those who steadfastly refuse to get vaccinated, is driving up the totals, public health experts said.
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