Daily deaths have dropped considerably since their January peak, with about 44 percent of the population now fully vaccinated.

By Dan Levin and Julie Bosman

It is a number that once seemed unimaginable.

In the next few days, more than 600,000 people in the United States will have died from Covid-19, the highest death toll in the world. The milestone approaches even though virus cases and deaths in this country have sharply fallen, vaccinations have been distributed widely, and many people have shed their masks and resumed prepandemic lives, including in New York and California, which both fully reopened on Tuesday.

Yet the coronavirus remains agonizingly present for those who knew the hundreds across the country still dying of it each day.

In April, one of the victims was Toni Gallo, 67, of Valparaiso, Ind., who had been sick with the virus for five months. “The world has lost a loving shining star,” her obituary read. On May 26, the coronavirus claimed the life of Frank Sanchez Jr., a 61-year-old Army veteran from Nekimi, Wis.; he was a union leader and lover of music who had built a successful D.J. business with his wife. Last week, Officer Ryan Barham, 43, of the Susanville, Calif., police died from the virus, the department announced.

Though the sheer number of deaths in the United States is higher than anywhere else, the country’s toll is lower, on a per capita basis, than in many European and Latin American countries, including Peru, Brazil, Belgium and Italy. It is 10 times the toll that former President Donald J. Trump once predicted.

“It’s a tragedy,” said Stephen Morse, a professor of epidemiology at the Columbia University Medical Center. “A lot of that tragedy was avoidable and it’s still happening.”

In the early days of the pandemic, federal officials had shocked the country by announcing at a White House briefing that even with strict stay-at-home orders, the virus might kill as many as 240,000 Americans.

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