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According to a large Pew Poll conducted recently, 72 percent of Americans have had someone they know either hospitalized or killed by COVID-19 throughout the pandemic, illuminating the devastating impact the virus has had on the US. The results come alongside an analysis performed by CNN, which shows that one in 500 US residents have died of COVID-19 as the death toll rises to a staggering 660,000 people – and those are just the ones recorded.
Those worst hit appear to be Black and Hispanic communities. Agreeing with previous research, 82 percent of Black adults and 78 percent of Hispanic adults responded that they knew someone who had previously been hospitalized or died as a result of the virus.
While the stats are bleak, it does paint a promising picture for the future. The vast majority of the survey respondents (62 percent) believe that the health benefits of lockdown restrictions were worth the sacrifices in life quality, and 73 percent were vaccinated. Most respondents believed that vaccines are the best way to protect America from the virus, though some expressed concern about the information they were receiving about possible health issues.
As countries rush to deliver the vaccine to as many people as possible, the poll also shows that only 26 percent of Americans are aware of the difficulties faced by adults in developing countries when trying to access the vaccine.
COVID-19 is now just a hair off of becoming the deadliest pandemic in US history, rapidly approaching the 1918 H1N1 influenza pandemic that killed 675,000 people in the US. With 2,678 deaths recorded in the past day alone in the USA, that figure will surely be topped in the coming weeks.
