Yuliya Talmazan and Rachel Elbaum at NBC:
More than 400,000 people have died of the coronavirus in the United States, according to an NBC News tally early Tuesday, a milestone that seemed unimaginable at the start of the pandemic a year ago.
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.
So many people have died in Los Angeles County that officials have temporarily suspended air-quality regulations that limit the number of cremations. Health officials and the L.A. County coroner requested the change because the current death rate is “more than double that of pre-pandemic years, leading to hospitals, funeral homes and crematoriums exceeding capacity, without the ability to process the backlog,” the South Coast Air Quality Management District said Sunday.
In recent days, there have been reports that states aren’t receiving the vaccine allotments they’ve been promised. Gov. Kate Brown of Oregon tweeted that the leaders of Operation Warp Speed had directly confirmed to her that “states will not be receiving increased shipments of vaccines from the national stockpile next week, because there is no federal reserve of doses.” The mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti, said, “the national supply simply isn’t coming.” When I asked Zients whether the federal government had less vaccine supply than has been promised, he wasn’t able to give an answer. “We’ll conduct a full evaluation when we’re in our seats on supply, but it’s hard for me to say more than that right now, given the lack of information sharing ...
