The US death toll from Covid-19 has hit one million, less than two-and-a-half years into the outbreak.
The confirmed number of dead is equivalent to a 9/11 attack every day for 336 days.
It is roughly equal to how many Americans died in the Civil War and the Second World War combined.
“It is hard to imagine a million people plucked from this earth,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, who leads a new pandemic centre at the Brown University School of Public Health in Providence, Rhode Island.
“It’s still happening and we are letting it happen.”
Some of those left behind say they cannot return to normal.
They replay their loved ones’ voicemail messages. Or watch old videos to see them dance.
When other people say they are done with the virus, they bristle with anger or ache in silence.
“’Normal’. I hate that word,” said Julie Wallace, 55, of Elyria, Ohio, who lost her husband to Covid-19 in 2020.
“All of us never get to go back to normal.”
Three out of every four deaths were people 65 and older. More men died than women. White people made up most of the deaths overall.
But black, Hispanic and Native American people have been roughly twice as likely to die from Covid-19 as their white counterparts.
Most deaths happened in urban areas, but rural places – where opposition to masks and vaccinations tends to run high – paid a heavy price at times.
The death toll less than two-and-a-half years into the outbreak is based on death certificate data compiled by the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Centre for Health Statistics.
But the real number of lives lost to Covid-19, either directly or indirectly, as a result of the disruption of the healthcare system in the world’s richest country, is believed to be far higher.
The milestone comes more than three months after the US reached 900,000 dead.
The pace has slowed since a harrowing winter surge fuelled by the Omicron variant.
The US is averaging about 300 Covid-19 deaths per day, compared with a peak of about 3,400 a day in January 2021.
The largest bell at Washington National Cathedral in the nation’s capital tolled 1,000 times a week ago, once for every 1,000 deaths.
President Joe Biden on Thursday ordered flags lowered to half-mast and called each life “an irreplaceable loss”.
“As a nation, we must not grow numb to such sorrow,” he said in a statement.
“To heal, we must remember.”
More than half the deaths occurred since vaccines became available in December of 2020.
Two-thirds of Americans are fully vaccinated, and nearly half of them have had at least one booster dose.
But demand for the vaccine has plummeted, and the campaign to put shots in arms has been plagued by misinformation, distrust and political polarisation.
Unvaccinated people have a 10 times greater risk of dying of Covid-19 than the fully vaccinated, according to the CDC.
“To me, that is what is just so particularly heartbreaking,” Ms Nuzzo said.
Vaccines are safe and greatly reduce the likelihood of severe illness, she said.
They “largely take the possibility of death off the table”.
