2 years into pandemic, Americans still feeling deadly impact of COVID-19

There have been nearly 965,000 American lives confirmed lost to the virus.

March marks two years since the coronavirus pandemic upended life across the globe.

Although the nationwide quarantine was initially meant to last only 14 days, in the hope of slowing down the spread of the virus, two weeks eventually turned into a two-year ordeal, lasting far longer than health experts had initially predicted.

"Two years ago, I, like many other people, thought that restrictions would be over in two months. If someone told me we would still be wearing masks after two years -- and effective vaccines -- I probably would have done things a little differently," David Dowdy, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told ABC News.

"Part of what has made this so exhausting is that we've thought, time and again, that the end of the pandemic was just a month or two away. But we've finally come to realize that a 'pandemic end date' just isn't coming anytime soon," Dowdy added.