![]() The woman who died of Covid-19 was a 64-year-old church member, talented baker and frequent volunteer during group dinners on Thanksgiving. ![]() Joy Baumgartner, a minister in Beloit, Wis., presided over a recent funeral that she described as “the saddest, most grief-stricken I have ever experienced.” He hears a frequent refrain: family members who vow to be vaccinated after losing a relative to the disease. “It has more of a lasting effect than any other natural death.” “The families are going through a lot of initial pain and shock and when we’re getting 20-, 30-, 40-year-old people who are passing away from it, that makes it so much more difficult,” he said. On a recent day, he said, an ambulance was summoned to return a coronavirus patient to a hospital, but the person died before the ambulance arrived. James Pollard, the coroner in Henry County, Ky., outside Louisville, said he was seeing more deaths occur at home than at any other time during the pandemic. In many parts of the South that weathered the worst of the summer surge, deaths from Covid-19 have only recently begun to slow down. “Younger people now feel this is a virus that won’t affect them.” “If you look back when the virus first started, the mantra was, this seems to be a disease that affects older people more severely, and fortunately younger people don’t seem to get as sick,” he said. ![]() The Delta variant is much more contagious than previous variants. Stephen Kimmel, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Florida, said younger people were particularly vulnerable to infection now because they have a relatively low rate of vaccination and are increasingly interacting with one another, leading to more opportunities to be infected. More than 3,800 people in their 40s died of Covid-19 in August, compared with 2,800 in January. Vaccination rates are lower for people in their 30s, and the number of people in that age group who died of the virus in August was almost double the number who died during January, the previous record month, according to provisional counts from the C.D.C. The nation’s vaccination campaign has been slowed by people who say they are hesitant or unwilling to get shots, amid a polarized landscape that has included misinformation from conservative and anti-vaccine commentators casting doubt on the safety of vaccines. Vaccine mandates have begun to take effect in some states and within some companies, and on Friday, California became the first state to announce plans to add the coronavirus vaccine to other vaccinations required to attend school, starting as early as next fall. Older Americans are still more susceptible to the virus but have benefited from their willingness to be vaccinated: People 65 and older, who have been among the most vulnerable to serious illness from the virus, have the highest rate of vaccination of all age groups, at 83 percent fully vaccinated, according to the C.D.C. The Delta surge has hit working-age Americans particularly hard. “And you just think, this just doesn’t have to be.” “It certainly has taken a toll,” he said. He works seven days a week and has lately been confronted with previously unimaginable problems: shortages of caskets, hospitals with full morgues and a need to schedule burials weeks into the future so cemeteries will have vaults available. It would be hard for me to define just how much worse it is.” It’s so much worse now than it was when the pandemic first happened. ![]() “These are people who, without the pandemic, they would almost certainly be alive and live full lives. “Now you’re dealing with people in their 30s and 40s and 50s,” he said. A 16-year-old girl in another family lost her mother, aunt and cousin to the virus, all in quick succession. Bright has spent months bearing witness to what he calls “premature grief.” In one family, a father of teenagers died. Wayne Bright, a funeral home director in Tampa, Fla., has been handling Covid-19 deaths since the beginning of the pandemic, working long hours under difficult circumstances.Ībout 40 percent of the most recent 100,000 people to die of the virus were under 65, a share higher than at any other point in the pandemic, and Mr. Coroners, funeral home directors and clergy members were again busy consoling the grief-stricken and preparing the dead for burial. Weary doctors and nurses voiced frustration that many of the patients whose lives they were now struggling to save had shunned vaccines. But the recent deaths have left families and friends, some of whom said they had thought the pandemic was largely over, stunned and devastated.
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