Four years.
Four hundred thousand coronvirus deaths.
I suppose it's just a coincidence, and it has been fairly clear for some time that we would cross 400,000 coronavirus deaths before Trump leaves office, but the fact that it's happening on his last day is appropriately symbolic, isn't it?
Some other less official counts placed us at this milestone yesterday, but deaths tracked by NBC News reached the grim total today.
More than 2 million people have been recorded killed by the virus worldwide, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. The U.S. death toll is the world's highest, even though the country has less than 5 percent of the world's population.
As of early Tuesday, there have been 400,103 U.S. deaths from Covid-19, according to NBC News' count. That is nearly equal to the number of American military casualties in World War II, which stands at around 405,000, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs.
We're obviously going to surpass the number of Americans killed in World War II by Thursday with an average of over 3,200 deaths per day, but it's not as if we're going to stop there.
The incoming Biden administration estimates that another 100,000 American will be killed by the coronavirus in February for a total of about 500,000 by March.
Ron Klain, President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s incoming White House chief of staff, had a dire forecast for the course of the coronavirus outbreak in the new administration’s first weeks, predicting that half a million Americans will have died from the coronavirus by the end of February.
“The virus is going to get worse before it gets better,” Mr. Klain said in an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “People who are contracting the virus today will start to get sick next month, will add to the death toll in late February, even March, so it’s going to take awhile to turn this around.”
There's one thing that every departing member of the Trump regime have in common and it's that none of them care about this at all.
I have no idea what the solution is -- and I don't think anyone can conclusively say what specific series of events led us here -- but we should probably do something about the fact that a good third of this country are sociopaths who literally do not care about mass death. They aren't moved by it at all. They don't even believe in it.
In hindsight, Americans demonstrating that they don't care about deaths resulting from mass shootings probably should have told us they also wouldn't care about mass deaths resulting from any other event.