The U.S. reached a horrifying milestone Friday as deaths from COVID-19 topped 900,000 since the start of the pandemic. The death toll is the highest confirmed count of coronavirus casualties of any nation in the world. Despite the wide availability of powerful vaccines that prevent serious illness, more than 2,000 Americans continue to die every day as the more contagious Omicron variant spreads. Though President Joe Biden promised to declare “independence from the virus” on July 4 of last year, new infections reached a staggering high of more than one million per day in January and have since fallen to under 500,000 a day, itself a previously unthinkable number. Experts say it didn’t have to be this way. Multiple authoritative studies have found that the U.S. suffered an excess of 100,000 deaths due to its patchwork and haphazard response to the respiratory virus. Now, however, those same experts can’t foresee an end to the pandemic any time in the near future. Dr. Anthony Fauci said in November, “We’re not going to eradicate it.”