There are too many memories at the Harwich Port boatyard that Craig LeBlanc owns and where Bob LeBlanc, 87, worked as facilities manager and all-around helpmeet.
The elder LeBlanc's death came less than two weeks after Allen Harbor Marine sales administrator Julie E. (Brochu) Bradley, 59, died on March 28, 2020, of the then-nascent coronavirus.
On Monday, Craig LeBlanc said he thinks of them often, "every time you hear about somebody testing positive or a close contact."
The million-death count just reached in the United States brings sorrow as well as some anger.
"There are still people denying it," Craig LeBlanc said.
Some individuals post on social media the only people who have died of COVID-19 were already sick, but LeBlanc said his father was hale, and Bradley, a breast cancer survivor, worked full time.
"That still really burns me," LeBlanc said of the social media posts. "None of those people lost anybody for sure."
The pace of COVID-19 fatalities has slowed considerably since spring 2020 when coronavirus tore through an unvaccinated society and wreaked special havoc on nursing homes.
By April of 2021, more than 400 people on Cape Cod had perished from coronavirus.
As of Friday, the COVID-19 death toll for Barnstable County stood at 584, indicating that while fatalities persist — two new deaths were recorded for Cape Cod that day — people are less likely to die of the infection that they were more than a year ago.
In mid-March, the state Department of Public Health started counting COVID-19 cases differently, in a way that shaved 3,700 deaths off the state's death toll, including 100 on Cape Cod.
Previously, the DPH had counted as COVID-19 fatalities people who had the disease listed as a cause of death on their death certificate or who had a COVID-19 diagnosis within 60 days of their death.
In March, state public health officials began counting as COVID-19 fatalities individuals who either had COVID-19 as a cause of death on their death certificate or who had a COVID-19 diagnosis within 30 days of their death.
The shortened diagnostic timeframe brought the state into alignment with guidance from the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists and helped to standardize death counts across the nation, according to public health officials.
The first recorded COVID-19 death on Cape Cod was that on March 23, 2020, of Richard Ottaway, a retired minister and professor of business ethics, whose wife, Elaine Davis Ottaway, herself survived a lonely ordeal with coronavirus.
With little known about COVID-19 spread and prevention at that point, the early death-wracked days were lonely ones, with family members prevented from hospital deathbeds and final farewells taking place over phones and Facebook Live.
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