700,000.
The Coronavirus pandemic has now taken the lives of 700 Americans. (NY Times)
“The United States surpassed 700,000 deaths from the coronavirus on Friday, a milestone that few experts had anticipated months ago when vaccines became widely available to the American public.
An overwhelming majority of Americans who have died in recent months, a period in which the country has offered broad access to shots, were unvaccinated. The United States has had one of the highest recent death rates of any country with an ample supply of vaccines.”
700,000 people have died of the virus. Despite this fact a strong vein of adherence to non-scientific date and outright conspiracies theories continues to complicate the nation’s response to the scourge. An extraordinarily effective way to prevent the illness exists, but many decline to take advantage of the vaccine because of widely disseminated misinformation campaigns that are effectively spread through social media and right wing media sites. And so the deaths continue unabated and virtually nothing can change the minds of the unvaccinated, not even the deaths of those they love.
