AP PHOTOS: US pandemic toll: In 1 year, half a million lives

AP PHOTOS: US pandemic toll: In 1 year, half a million lives

SeattlePI.com

Published

Just one year ago, America had no idea.

Life in February 2020 still felt normal. 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 U.S. authorities recorded the country’s first known death from the virus.

Precisely a year later, America is hurtling toward a horrifying milestone of 500,000 deaths from COVID-19.

A relentless march of death and tragedy has warped time and memory. It became easy to forget the shocking images, so many day after day, of scenes once unthinkable in a country of such wealth and power. As the year unfolded, Associated Press photographers formed a pictorial record of suffering, emotion and resilience. It shows the year that changed America.

Looking back, we can see it happened in phases.

——-

In the beginning, the crisis felt far away.

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. Hollywood icon Tom Hanks walked the red carpet at the Oscars, not knowing a month later he and his wife would contract COVID-19. Baseball spring training drew the usual crowds, without a face mask in sight.

But an ominous cruise ship with COVID-infected passengers circled off the coast of California. Within weeks, the Grand Princess - and the initial efforts by the state and the federal governments to bar it from coming ashore - became a symbol of America’s misguided belief that it could keep the disease out.

Words like shutdown and social distancing were not yet part of our national vocabulary in those early days. Few of us wore...

Full Article