More than 800,000 Americans have now died from the coronavirus, the highest recorded national death toll from the global pandemic.
It comes as the US reached 50 million confirmed cases of OVID-19 on Monday.
Most deaths have been recorded among the unvaccinated and the elderly, and more Americans died in 2021 than in 2020.
The US is again seeing deaths rising at an alarming rate.
The last 100,000 deaths came in just the past 11 weeks, a quicker pace than any at other points aside from last winter’s surge.
“The waves of illness that we’re seeing will continue until the population-level immunity is high enough to prevent them. Quite simply, we’re not there yet,” said Dr Keri Althoff, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
It has been more than 650 days since the first American patient dying from COVID-19 was reported in Seattle, Washington (public health officials have since attributed earlier deaths to the virus).
Since the Pfizer vaccine – the first jab to be approved in the US – was rolled out last winter, nearly 300,000 more fatalities have been recorded.
