COVID-19 Death Toll Tops 400K In U.S

The horrifying prediction follows a surge of infections and hospitalizations in multiple states, including Alabama and California, as well as a nationwide average of more than 3,200 new deaths a day over the past week, according to The COVID Tracking Project.

The American Medical Association lamented the “once unimaginable” death toll and urged Americans to continue taking precautions to protect themselves from the virus.

“One in every 820 people in our country have died during this pandemic — often alone, typically away from family and friends — comforted only by physicians and nurses in layers of PPE,” the group’s president, Dr. Susan Bailey, said in a statement Tuesday.

“With a more contagious strain of COVID-19 spreading rapidly across the country, the simple steps we’ve advocated for months are more important than ever: wear your mask, practice physical distancing, and wash your hands, to help reduce illness and deaths,” she added.

Ten months after the World Health Organization declared the global health crisis a pandemic, the virus has become so genetically diverse that new variants are taking over the main strain in some regions of the world. In the U.K., a highly contagious variant that has already spread to the U.S. and other countries has become dominant in parts of England. In Ohio, an evolving version of the U.K. strain has become the “dominant virus” in Columbus, researchers confirmed last week.

The CDC expects the U.K. variant to become dominant in this country by March.

Other variants have been reported in Brazil and South Africa. But despite growing concerns about new mutations spreading around the world, vaccines still seem to work against them.

Dr. Pardis Sabeti, an evolutionary biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, said one of the concerns is that the virus “may stumble upon a mutation” that makes it more dangerous.

“We’re in a race against time,” he told The Associated Press.