The United States Marks Half a Million COVID-19 Deaths

An inconceivable loss.

Artist Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg walks among thousands of white flags planted in remembrance of Americans who have died of COVID-19 in October 2020.Patrick Semansky/AP

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The United States’ COVID-19 death toll has surpassed 500,000, a staggering milestone.

“People decades from now are gonna be talking about this as a terribly historic milestone in the history of this country, to have these many people to have died from a respiratory-borne infection,” Dr. Anthony Fauci said in a CNN interview Monday morning. “It really is a terrible situation that we’ve been through, and that we’re still going through.”

It’s nearly impossible to conceive of the loss of half a million Americans. The virus has killed one in 670 people across the country. In places like New York City, the number is closer to one in 295. President Biden will hold a memorial ceremony this evening and will order flags on federal property to fly at half staff for five days.

COVID-19 infection rates in the US have fallen dramatically since their January peak, and more than 13 percent of the country’s population has received at least one vaccine dose. Still, public health officials are urging the public not to let their guard down. At a White House COVID-19 response team press briefing this afternoon, Fauci reiterated that people should continue wearing masks because of the possibility that people who have been vaccinated could still be infected and spread the disease asymptomatically.

“There will be things that you will not be able to do because the burden of virus in society will be very high,” he said. “We are still at an unacceptably high baseline level with the seven-day average being quite high.”

It was a little less than a year ago that then-President Trump declared that the coronavirus was “going to disappear.” Lockdowns in New York City, one of the initial epicenters, began in mid-March 2020. Since then, the world as we knew it has disappeared.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

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