Meanwhile, 600 years later...

US COVID deaths

Last week in the US, President Joe Biden mourned “the painful milestone” of 700,000 American deaths from COVID-19 - with the worst statistic being that the last 100,000 deaths occurred when the vaccines, which, described by the SMH on 5 October as “overwhelmingly prevent deaths, hospitalisations and serious illness”, were available to any American over the age of 12.

In the National Mall in Washington, 700,000 white flags commemorated those deaths.

The Herald reports, “The Milestone is deeply frustrating to doctors, public health officials and the American public, who watched a pandemic that had been easing earlier in the summer take a dark turn. Tens of millions of Americans have refused to get vaccinated, allowing the highly contagious delta variant to tear through the country and send the death toll from 600,000 to 700,000 in 3 ½ months.” And it shows no sign of stopping.

In lessons for us, if we needed more evidence, 70% of the deaths were in unvaccinated people, “and of those vaccinated people who died with breakthrough infections, most caught the virus from an unvaccinated person.”