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The U.S. stood Sunday at the brink of a once-unthinkable tally: 500,000 people lost to the coronavirus. A year into the pandemic, the running total of lives lost was about 498,000 — 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.” (Raby, 2/22)

President Joe Biden will mark the U.S. crossing 500,000 lives lost from COVID-19 with a moment of silence and candle lighting ceremony at the White House. The nation is expected to pass the grim milestone on Monday, just over a year after the first confirmed U.S. fatality due to the novel coronavirus. (2/22)

A year ago, covid-19 had killed just a handful of people in the United States. Now, the pandemic’s official death toll equals the size of a major city, more than the population of Kansas City, Mo., and nearly as many as Atlanta or Sacramento. It can be hard to grasp the enormity — almost half a million people, gone. What if we imagined them traveling as one group? Or killed in action? Or all buried together? (Galocha and Berkowitz, 2/21)

Each death has left untold numbers of mourners, a ripple effect of loss that has swept over towns and cities. Each death has left an empty space in communities across America: a bar stool where a regular used to sit, one side of a bed unslept in, a home kitchen without its cook. The living find themselves amid vacant places once occupied by their spouses, parents, neighbors and friends — the nearly 500,000 coronavirus dead. (Bosman, 2/21)

As the nation reaches the milestone of a half-million deaths about a year after the first American succumbed to the coronavirus, the number of children killed by the disease remains relatively small. ... Each death represents a shattered family and a trauma deepened, parents say, by the rampant belief that kids can’t get covid, or that it doesn’t much harm them when they do. (Fisher, Cha, Gowen, Hernandez and Rozsa, 2/21)

More than 20.5 million years of life may have been lost during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a Scientific Reports study published yesterday. The study also reports that, compared with the median mortality rate of the seasonal flu, COVID-19 deaths may be two to nine times higher. The researchers looked at mortality and life expectancy data in 81 countries through Jan 6, 2021, focusing on both COVID-related deaths and excess deaths. By analyzing 1,279,866 deaths, they found that 20,507,518 years of life were lost over the study period. While this averages out to be about 16 years per death, years of life lost (YLL) were distributed unevenly across age groups. (2/19)

Dr. Anthony Fauci called the United States' approach of half a million deaths due to Covid-19 "terrible," "really horrible" and "historic" Sunday. "It's nothing like we've ever been through in the last 102 years since the 1918 influenza pandemic," he told host Dana Bash on CNN's "State of the Union." "People decades from now are going to be talking about this as a terribly historic milestone in the history of this country." (Mueller, 2/21)