U.S. COVID-19 death toll nears 100,000, New York Times calls it "incalculable loss"

NEW YORK, May 24 (Xinhua) -- The front page of Sunday's New York Times features the names of 1,000 people who have died of COVID-19 in the United States. Calling it "an incalculable loss," the newspaper clarified that "the 1,000 people here reflect just 1 percent of toll."

"They were not simply names on a list. They were us," the paper said. "Numbers alone cannot possibly measure the impact of the coronavirus in America, whether it is the number of patients treated, jobs interrupted or lives cut short."

"Toward the end of May in the year 2020, the number of people in the United States who have died from the coronavirus neared 100,000 -- almost all of them within a three-month span. An average of more than 1,100 deaths a day," said the cover story sub-titled "The Human Toll," which was printed on four full pages including the cover.

"Why has this happened in the United States of 2020? Why has the virus claimed disproportionately large number of black and Latino victims? Why were nursing homes so devastated? These questions of why and how and whom will be asked for decades to come," said the report.

"For now, all we can do is hold our collective breath, inch toward some approximation of how things were -- and try to process a loss of life greater than what the country incurred in several decades of war, from Vietnam to Iraq," it added.

Over 96,000 people have died of the coronavirus in the United States, the largest toll among all the countries in the world, according to the Center of Systems Science and Engineering of Johns Hopkins University as of Sunday morning.