Print More than half a million people in the U.S. have died of COVID-19. Hope is in sight, but devastation remains. TOP STORIES COVID-19 deaths in the United States have officially surpassed 500,000 — a toll that is hard to fathom. It’s as if all the people in a city the size of Atlanta or Sacramento simply vanished. The number is greater than the combined U.S. battlefield deaths in both world wars and Vietnam. “You see that number, and it’s not just another number,” said Bettina Gonzales, 39, whose 61-year-old father, David Gonzales, a football and basketball coach in Harlingen, Texas, died in August. “It’s a lot of tragedy that goes behind that number.”