Death fell hard across America this week.
More than 7,000 people died of COVID-19. Total U.S. infections of the coronavirus reached nearly half a million. It was the worst seven days the country has seen so far.
The news came as the world faced its own grim milestone Friday: more than 100,000 dead in an outbreak that has battered countless towns and cities. Even as the virus waned in China, its origin, it has surged across the planet.
America has become its greatest victim. From Boston to Honolulu, curfews were put into place. From Los Angeles to Miami, masks were no longer an option but the law. Good Friday services were canceled, intubated patients succumbed in hospital hallways, wooden boxes were lowered into mass graves.
This was America _ a strange, new, scary place, where rage mixed with bewilderment, and bad numbers crept higher. More than 250 people died in California. Infections slowed in the epicenter of New York and the early-outbreak site of Seattle. But the deaths are still piling up, and cases are spiking among black communities in Detroit and New Orleans. So are they for Latinos in the Midwest and South.
For the doctors in packed hospitals _ including one in New York who described what he was enduring as "mental terrorism" _ and the nurses running out of protective suits who have watched the virus take their colleagues, the fight against the pandemic is far from over.
For the caretakers in nursing homes where the virus has killed scores of the elderly, and the chaplains who now tend to grieving EMTs, years of training aren't preparation enough for the pain. It wasn't war or 9/11, but it felt like it, an unfolding, pervasive disaster waged by an invisible enemy.
Parents, first told that their children would be spared as the disease hit older generations, now bury their kids in anger and await funerals that may never come.
These are scenes from a ravaged America:
