Tragic Milestone

One million American lives lost

” Today, we mark a tragic milestone: one million American lives lost to COVID-19…. 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. It’s critical that Congress sustain these resources in the coming months. In remembrance, let us draw strength from each other as fellow Americans. For while we have been humbled, we never give up. We can and will do this together as the United States of America.” [Part of the statement from President Joe Biden 5/12/22]

COVID was different

“We epidemiologists were slow to realize that COVID was different from those other coronaviruses that jumped species to the human population,” he said. “They were hard to transmit, and we thought initially that COVID was similar. It turned out to be a very different virus. It was transmitted very readily. It had a lot of asymptomatic infection and spread very, very rapidly. It took us epidemiologists too long to recognize that.” – Dr. William Schaffner is medical director of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases.”

Vaccinations remain effective and important

However, “the most significant aspect of the death toll is the fact that more deaths occurred after the vaccine was available than before,” noted Dr. Amesh Adalja, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, in Baltimore. “An extremely high proportion of deaths are vaccine-preventable and were, in effect, chosen or willful because people turned away from the vaccines and bought into fallacious misinformation and conspiracy theories,” Adalja said.” [Source link USNews & World Report]