Workers wearing personal protective equipment bury bodies during the coronavirus pandemic in a trench on Hart Island in the Bronx borough of New York, U.S., April 9, 2020. /AP
"Our grandchildren and future generations will look back at us and blame us for the biggest failure in facing a pandemic in a country that's the richest country in the world. That we allowed people to die, that we didn't protect our vulnerable populations – Native American, Hispanic and African Americans. That we did not protect our essential workers," Dr Ali Mokdad, a public health researcher at the University of Washington, told the Strait Times when U.S.'s COVID-19 death toll passed the half-million milestone on Monday.
A somewhat fading grayish column appeared on the front page of the New York Times on Sunday morning as a visual representation of the "biggest failure" – half a million of Americans died within a year.
Nine months ago, on May 24, 2020, the New York Times published a cover page with all the basic information of the 10,000 people who had died from the coronavirus then. As shocking as the image was, it didn't help stop the relentless march of death and tragedy.
New York Times front page coverage on coronavirus death toll on May 23, 2020 (L) and February 21, 2021 (R).
A year into the pandemic, the running total of lives lost was about 502,000 as of Wednesday – roughly the population of Kansas City, Missouri, and just shy of the size of Atlanta. The figure compiled by Johns Hopkins University surpasses the number of people who died in 2019 of chronic lower respiratory diseases, stroke, Alzheimer's, flu and pneumonia combined.
"It's nothing like we have ever been through in the last 102 years, since the 1918 influenza pandemic," the nation's top infectious disease expert, Dr Anthony Fauci, said on CNN's State of the Union.
While the count is based on figures supplied by government agencies around the world, the real death toll is believed to be significantly higher, in part because of inadequate testing and cases inaccurately attributed to other causes early on.
Despite efforts to administer coronavirus vaccines, a widely cited model by the University of Washington projects the U.S. death toll will surpass 589,000 by June 1.
"People will be talking about this decades and decades and decades from now," Fauci said on NBC's Meet The Press.
(With input from AP)