The US death toll from COVID-19 hit 1 million on Monday. The staggering toll comes less than three years into the pandemic.
The total is roughly equal to the number of Americans who died in the Civil War and Warld War II, combined.
Although most deaths happened in urban areas, rural places still paid a heavy toll. The numbers come from death certificate data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The actual number of deaths may be much higher, however.
The US has the highest reported coronavirus toll in the world, though health experts suspect that the toll in countries like Russia, Brazil, and India may be higher than official figures.
This development comes more than three months after the US reached 900,000 dead, a slower pace than the winter surge propelled by the omicron variant.
The current daily death toll is around 300 in the US, much less than the peak of 3,400 in January 2021. However, new cases are on the rise again, rising more than 60% in the past two weeks to an average of 86,000 a day, though still much lower than the height of 800,000 during the winter.
More than half the deaths occurred since vaccines became widely available in December. Two-thirds of Americans are fully vaccinated, and nearly half of them have had at least one booster dose.
Demand for the vaccine has plummeted, however, even though vaccines have been demonstrated to largely reduce the chance of severe symptoms or death. Unvaccinated people have a 10 times greater risk of dying of COVID-19 than the fully vaccinated, according to the CDC.