Short answers, pulled from the story.
The first American COVID-19 case was reported on the 20th of January, 2020. The earliest known U.S. death occurred on the 6th of February, 2020, when a 57-year-old woman died in Santa Clara County, California, though the CDC did not confirm this until the 21st of April. The virus had likely been circulating undetected since at least early January and possibly since November 2019.
The U.S. COVID-19 death toll reached 1 million by the 4th of May, 2022, the largest recorded death toll in any single country. The pandemic is ranked as the deadliest disaster in American history and was the third-leading cause of death in the United States in 2020, behind only heart disease and cancer.
The Alpha variant, first detected in the United Kingdom, became the dominant COVID-19 strain in the United States by the 7th of April, 2021. Delta, first detected in India, surpassed Alpha by the 7th of July, 2021, and accounted for 99 percent of U.S. cases by August. The Omicron variant, first discovered in South Africa, drove as many as 1.5 million new U.S. infections in a single day in January 2022.
American Indian and Alaska Native people had the highest COVID-19 hospitalization and death rates of any racial group, according to CDC data from June 2021. Black Americans had COVID-19 mortality rates more than twice as high as White and Asian Americans as of September 2020. From 2019 to 2020, U.S. life expectancy fell by three years for Hispanic Americans, 2.9 years for African Americans, and 1.2 years for White Americans.
The first U.S. COVID-19 vaccine doses were administered on the 14th of December, 2020. The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine had received FDA emergency authorization on the 11th of December, and the Moderna vaccine followed on the 18th. The first vaccine to receive full FDA approval did so on the 23rd of August, 2021.
The U.S. economy contracted 4.8 percent in the first quarter of 2020. GDP fell at an annualized rate of 32.9 percent in the second quarter of 2020, the largest quarterly drop on record. The unemployment rate reached 14.7 percent in April 2020, with more than 23 million Americans out of work.