One million dead: Five things to know about America's pandemic

One million dead from Covid-19: two years ago it would have been unimaginable, but now the United States is on the verge of surpassing this terrible milestone. One million dead works out to around one in every 330 Americans -- one of the highest death rates in the developed world. Britain has seen around one in 380 people die of Covid, while in France it has been one in 456. At the height of the Omicron wave, the United States recorded an average of more than 800,000 cases per day, pushing the total since the pandemic began to nearly 82 million cases. But this again is probably an underestimate, especially given the lack of tests at the beginning of the pandemic and now the success of self-tests, which are not systematically reported to the authorities. The virus was first reported in the northwest United States -- but it swiftly reached New York, a global transportation hub, which briefly became the epicenter of the first wave. Its most affluent inhabitants simply left, while the less privileged confined themselves in cramped quarantines. Donald Trump, president when the pandemic hit, was criticized for his slow response, how he played down the scale of the coming disaster, and his contribution to misinformation surrounding the pandemic in the weeks and months to come. The result? The first vaccines in the U.S. -- from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna -- were available in mid-December, less than a year after the first cases were reported in China. Between progressives defending physical distancing, masks and inoculations, and conservatives rejecting any intrusion into their individual freedoms, the battle raged all the way to the top, where Trump only reluctantly wore a mask while his successor Joe Biden scrupulously followed protocols and championed vaccinations. The latest development is that in April, a Trump-appointed judge in Louisiana lifted the requirement to wear masks on public transport, a decision that the federal government has appealed. More than two years since the pandemic reached the United States, the rate of infection is rising yet again, due to sub-variants of the very contagious variant Omicron.