The US on Wednesday surpassed a once-unimaginable one million coronavirus deaths, according to one data tracker.
American reached the grim milestone 27 months after the first confirmed Covid-19 case in the US, according to , which compiled data on the death toll. It is the first news outlet to report that one million people in the country have died of the virus.
Health officials at the end of March had said that the one million deaths were expected in the coming weeks.
The US has the highest Covid-19 death toll of any country in the world, and by a significant margin. The nation with the second highest number of confirmed deaths is Brazil, with more than 660,000.
Dr Christopher Murray, who leads the University of Washington School of Medicine’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, said the milestone has long been looming.
However, ‘the fact that so many have died is still appalling’, he told NBC News, adding that ‘this is far from over’.
While NBC News has called the one million deaths, other organizations tracking mortality rates have not.
Johns Hopkins University’s Coronavirus Resource Center reported 994,744 deaths as of Wednesday. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported 993,341 total deaths as of the same afternoon.
The daily death count has fallen, but about 360 people are still dying each day.
One million people is equivalent to the population of the tenth largest city in the US, San Jose, California.
‘Each of those people touched hundreds of other people,’ Diana Ordonez, whose 40-year-old husband died of Covid-19 in April 2020, told NBC News.
‘It’s an exponential number of other people that are walking around with a small hole in their heart.’
The US ranks 18th in coronavirus deaths per capita worldwide. Peru has the highest figure in that ranking.
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