mm hmm.
A little more than two years into the COVID-19 pandemic.
The US has recorded more than one million deaths attributed to the disease.
This is a extraordinary number of lives lost to
Covid,
the vast majority would not have had lost in this time.
Otherwise,
the most recent CDC data show.
Covid is the third leading cause of death in the US after heart disease and cancer.
And life expectancy dropped by about two years as the pandemic took hold.
So as we cross the threshold of a million known COVID-19 deaths and look back
what we see is really a surge in deaths that has hit the us unevenly.
For some groups,
the risk of severe outcomes from COVID-19 seems to be higher.
But who are they and what made them more vulnerable.
Mhm.
The coronavirus in Washington State now reporting at least 15 deaths.
A cluster of infections at a nursing home in Kirkland,
at Life Care Center,
the epicenter of the US outbreak.
One of the first major outbreaks that we saw was in a nursing home in the Seattle
area.
And that was kind of the harbinger of what we would see really relentlessly.
For the first year of the pandemic covid has hit residents of nursing homes
and other types of long term care facilities particularly hard.
Federal data show nursing home residents in the US represent less than 1% of the
overall population,
but make up at least 15% of recorded covid deaths.
There are two reasons for that.
Number one is people tend to be older and secondly they also have more
illnesses.
Since the pandemic began,
nearly three quarters of covid deaths have been among people at least 65 years old.
After vaccines were introduced,
the share of deaths among seniors went down,
but this group was hit hard again.
During the recent omicron surge.
Older americans are more likely to have underlying health problems like heart disease and
diabetes that can complicate covid infections in nursing homes,
The highly contagious virus could infect the frailest people who were living in close
confines.
It became clear that it was just really,
really difficult to keep the virus out of these facilities.
One issue obviously is that you have staff who live in the community and come and go
every day.
At the beginning of the pandemic,
millions of office employees began working from home.
But a class of employees deemed essential,
including those who work at nursing home facilities had jobs that required them to leave the
house,
having that kind of front line job,
whether it was health care or you know,
a meatpacking plant or elsewhere meant increased risk of being
exposed to the virus.
It's unclear exactly how many people in a particular profession died from covid
because the CDC doesn't publish covid death data by occupation,
But a study among Californians from UC San Francisco found essential workers like
foodservice healthcare and retail employees faced at greater risk of death in
2020 compared to pre pandemic numbers,
they didn't have the luxury like many of us had of staying home and sitting behind a
laptop,
they still had to go out and be in harm's way.
Data from the U.
S.
Census Bureau show that people with lower incomes are much less likely to work
remotely.
That group of course was at greater risk of getting covid and that group was disproportionately
people of color,
which explains a lot of the eventual racial gap that we saw in covid.
While most covid deaths in the US are among white people who make up the majority of the population,
certain non white groups have a higher covid mortality rate.
It's a higher number than you would expect given their numbers in the population.
Certainly the black population and hispanic population stand out in
that regard.
Public health experts,
including those at the National Institutes of Health and the CDC say that disparities
stem from many factors like pre existing medical conditions and access to health
care.
The proportion of underlying illness in this country is not evenly distributed by racial groups.
We know that black americans are more likely to be sick with hypertension diabetes than are white
americans.
That in turn is a product of longstanding systems of marginalization
that actually result in greater burden of illness among black americans.
Epidemiologists say the true us death toll from COVID is likely even higher than one million.
This includes deaths that were misdiagnosed early in the pandemic when the disease was new and tests
were scarce,
so there were probably more opportunities at that time,
at least to miss classify a death as something else.
Maybe call it influenza.
For example,
instead of Covid,
19 excess deaths associated with the pandemic have reached more than 1.1
million,
according to the CDC.
Some of those deaths came from indirect fallout.
Like deferred healthcare and missed health screenings,
experts say it will likely take years to fully realize the pandemic stole.
But a million deaths is a million parents,
grandparents,
cousins,
uncles,
lovers,
friends.
It's a million people and nothing redeems a tragedy like that.
But it seems to me like we are not honoring the tragedy if we do not
learn from the moment so that we can improve.
Yeah.