In Pictures

In Pictures: US pandemic toll – one year, half a million lives

A victim is taken on a stretcher into the United Memorial Medical Center after going through COVID testing on March 19, 2020, in Houston, Texas, as the disease began spreading throughout the US. [David J Phillip/AP]

23 Feb 2021

Last February, Americans still greeted each other with handshakes and commuted to work in crowded public transportation.

Children were still at school in actual classrooms. But concern was building about a mystery respiratory illness that had just been named COVID-19.

There was panic buying, and a sense of trepidation.

Yet, it was tempered by a large dose of American optimism. The coronavirus still felt like a foreign problem, even as US authorities recorded the country’s first known death from the virus.

Words such as lockdown and social distancing were not yet part of the national vocabulary in the early days. Few wore masks as they stood in long lines to stockpile groceries and cleared the shelves of toilet paper.

Precisely a year later, the United States has surpassed a horrifying milestone of 500,000 deaths from COVID-19 – more than any nation in the world.

The United States has surpassed a horrifying milestone of 500,000 deaths from COVID-19 - more than any nation in the world. [Jae C. Hong/AP Photo]

Hollywood Actor Tom Hanks arrives at the Oscars in Los Angeles on February 9, 2020. The star would later fall ill with the coronavirus. [Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP]

Fans watch from grass beyond the outfield as the Chicago Cubs play the Milwaukee Brewers in a spring training baseball game on February 29, 2020, in Mesa, Arizona. [Gregory Bull/AP Photo]

Judie Shape, who tested positive for coronavirus, blows a kiss to her family on March 11, 2020, at a care centre in Kirkland, Washington, near Seattle. [Ted S Warren/AP Photo]

Deanna Butts reaches for one of the last packages of toilet paper at a grocery store in the Tenleytown area of Washington on March 17, 2020. [Carolyn Kaster/AP Photo]

A homeless person sits on a wheelchair under the rain on Sunset Boulevard in the Echo Park neighbourhood of Los Angeles on April 6, 2020. Homeless people are particularly vulnerable to contracting and spreading the coronavirus. [Damian Dovarganes/AP Photo]

Workers wearing personal protective equipment bury bodies during the coronavirus pandemic in a trench on Hart Island in the Bronx borough of New York on April 9, 2020. [John Minchillo/AP Photo]

A doctor assists nurses as they treat a patient from a nursing home showing symptoms of COVID-19 at a hospital in Yonkers, New York, on April 20, 2020. [John Minchillo/AP Photo]

The family of Larry Hammond wave as a line of cars with friends and family - who could not attend his funeral because of the coronavirus - pass by their home in New Orleans on April 22, 2020. [Gerald Herbert/AP Photo]

Miguel Lopez, right, and Noe Meza prepare to move a body of a COVID-19 victim to a morgue at Providence Holy Cross Medical Center in the Mission Hills section of Los Angeles on January 9, 2021. [Jae C. Hong/AP Photo]

Nurse Joselito Florendo administers the COVID-19 vaccine to Michael Chesler at a mass vaccination site set up in the parking lot of Six Flags Magic Mountain in Valencia, California on January 22, 2021. [Jae C Hong/AP Photo]

Nurse Patricia Carrete of El Paso, Texas, walks down a hallway during a night shift at a field hospital set up to handle a surge of COVID-19 patients on February 10, 2021, in Cranston, Rhode Island. [David Goldman/AP Photo]

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