The U.S. death toll from COVID-19 eclipsed 700,000 late Friday — a number greater than the population of Boston. The milestone is deeply frustrating to doctors, public health officials and the American public, who watched a pandemic that had been easing earlier in the summer take a dark turn. And of those vaccinated people who died with breakthrough infections, most caught the virus from an unvaccinated person, he said. “I remember when we broke that 100,000-death mark, people just shook their heads and said ‘Oh, my god,’” said Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association. “Then we said, ‘Are we going to get to 200,000?’ Then we kept looking at 100,000-death marks,” and finally surpassed the estimated 675,000 American deaths from the 1918-19 flu pandemic.
