<\/em>Rise from 700,000 to 800,000 happened in just 74 days compared with 119 days for the previous 100,000 increase in deaths<\/p>\n<\/h3>\n <\/b><\/p>\n <\/b><\/p>\n MONDAY, Dec. 13, 2021 (HealthDay News) — The COVID-19 death toll in the United States reached 800,000 on Monday, and one expert believes it will likely hit 1 million at some point in 2022.<\/p>\n The 800,156 confirmed deaths in the nearly two years since the first known U.S. victims of COVID-19 were confirmed in February 2020 is more than any other nation in the world and a larger number than the population of Boston, Washington, D.C., or Seattle, NBC News<\/em> reported. Furthermore, the rise from 700,000 to 800,000 happened in just 74 days compared with 119 days for the previous 100,000 increase in deaths.<\/p>\n “It’s a very sad moment, it’s mind-boggling,” Michael Rodriguez, M.D., vice chairman of the department of family medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California in Los Angeles, told NBC News<\/em>. “We’re beyond numb.”<\/p>\n The death toll is expected to rise even higher on Monday as more state and local health departments provide new data. The seven-day death average in the United States was 1,092, according to the most recent U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, a 27.8 percent increase from the prior week, NBC News<\/em> reported.<\/p>\n The pandemic does not appear close to slowing down, said Vin Gupta, M.D., a critical care pulmonologist and affiliate associate professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. He expects the U.S. death toll will reach 1 million some time next year. “That’s just the reality of the situation,” he told NBC News<\/em>. “The same people who didn’t get an initial shot won’t get boosters. It’s a lot of preventable death.”<\/p>\n