FAIRFIELD-SUISUN, CALIFORNIA
Iris Martinez weeps as she stands with another woman at the casket of her 60-year-old father, Rafael Martinez, after his death from COVID-19 in Los Angeles last summer.
(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Time/TNS)
US death toll from COVID-19 surpasses 500,000
Laura King, Los Angeles Times, (TNS)
WASHINGTON — Covid-19 deaths in the United States surpassed 500,000 on Monday, the latest desolate way station in a once-uncharted landscape of loss.
The toll is hard to fathom. It’s as if all the people in an American city the size of Atlanta or Sacramento simply vanished. The number is greater than the combined U.S. battlefield deaths in both world wars and Vietnam. Last month, based on average 24-hour fatality counts, it was as if the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, had happened every single day.