[The Soup Nazi]

From The Washington Post:

How much is 250,000 deaths? Enough to empty wide swaths of the country.

As of Thursday, over a quarter-million people in the United States had died of covid-19 as the number of confirmed cases continues to skyrocket. Hospitals are short on nurses, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended against traveling for the holidays.

Each of these 250,000 people is a life lost to a single virus in less than nine months. One way to understand the impact of this loss is to compare it with the number of people who live in your town, city or county. This amount of death would draw a hole in America’s heartland.

250,000 people is more than the population of any of these counties

 

The majority of counties in the United States have less than 250,000 inhabitants. In these places, the number of people who have died of covid-19 in the United States is the same or many times greater than the county’s population.

 

As deaths continue to rise across the country, daily confirmed cases of covid-19 are skyrocketing. Over 11 million confirmed cases have been reported, which is more than the combined population of multiple states.

 

The recent spike in daily confirmed cases is the largest wave so far during the pandemic in the United States, and it shows no sign of slowing. It is estimated that more than 3 million people in the nation have active coronavirus infections and are potentially contagious.

 

This week, two companies announced coronavirus vaccines that appear to be more than 90 percent effective in clinical trials. However, it will still be many months before the vaccine is distributed to people who are not considered at “high risk” based on their job, age and underlying health conditions.