A widely circulated list ranking the deadliest days in American history is picked apart here by Slate for leaving some things out, but the point remains that Covid deaths on several days this month have been higher than from the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor that killed 2,403 people. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that number has been surpassed on multiple days in December, including on Wednesday, when Covid claimed 3,411 lives–far and away a record and more than from the September 11, 2001 attacks. “The epidemic in the U.S. is punishing,” Dr. Michael Ryan, the World Health Organization’s chief of emergencies, told the Associated Press. “It’s quite frankly shocking to see one to two persons a minute die in the U.S. — a country with a wonderful, strong health system, amazing technological capacities.” More than 292,000 people in the U.S. have died of the coronavirus, nearly one-fifth of the world’s total, according to the Johns Hopkins University tracker. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington forecasts that 500,000 people in the United States will have died from coronavirus by April—but if mask use increased to 95 percent, it could save 56,000 lives, CNN reports.