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.
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Advertisement Over the past year, the pandemic has left few American lives unscathed. All the ways in which society organizes itself school and work, economy and governance, friendship and family life, love and romance have changed, in some instances irrevocably.
Ohio kindergarten teacher Holly Maxwell used to love giving hugs to her little pupils when they were in need of comfort. Her school outside Uniontown has been holding in-person classes all year, but she has only a dozen students instead of the usual 22, and six feet of social distance are carefully observed.
That means no cluster of 5-year-olds around Maxwell’s rocking chair for story time, no playing together with building blocks and puzzles.
The vaccine rollout offers the greatest hope for relief.
“We have been hit by these pandemics in the past, and they almost wiped us out, like smallpox,” said Dr. Mary Owen, president of the Assn. of American Indian Physicians and a member of the Tlingit Tribe in Alaska. “We can’t afford not to partake in these vaccines.”
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But distrust of the federal government especially on issues related to health and medicine dates back to colonization.
Carlita Bergen, center, holds a shovel as Navajo Nation police officer Carolyn Tallsalt smooths dirt over COVID-19 victim Arnold Billy’s grave in Tuba City, Ariz.