Biden mourns 500,000
President marks ‘heartbreaking’ coronavirus death toll in ceremony
WASHINGTON — With sunset remarks and a national moment of silence, President Joe Biden on Monday confronted head-on the country’s loss — half a million Americans in the
COVID-19 pandemic — as he tried to strike a balance between mourning and hope.
Addressing the “grim, heartbreaking milestone,” Biden stepped to a lectern in the White House Cross Hall, unhooked his face mask and delivered a eulogy for more than 500,000 Americans
he said he felt he knew.
“We often hear people described as ordinary Americans. There’s no such thing,” he said Monday evening. “There’s nothing ordinary about them. The people we lost were extraordinary.”
“Just like that,” he added, “so many of them took their last breath alone.”
Biden spoke in personal terms, referencing his own losses as he tried to comfort the huge number of Americans whose lives have been changed by the pandemic.
“I know all too well. I know what it’s like to not be there when it happens,” Biden said. “I know what it’s like when you are there, holding their hands, as they look in your eye and they slip away. That black hole in your chest, you feel like you’re being sucked into it.”
The president, who lost his first wife and baby daughter in a car collision and later an adult son to brain cancer, leavened the grief with a message of hope.
“This nation will smile again. This nation will know sunny days again. This nation will know joy again. And as we do, we’ll remember each person we’ve lost, the lives they lived, the loved ones they left behind.”
He said, “We have to resist becoming numb to the sorrow. We have to resist viewing each life as a statistic or a blur or, on the news. We must do so to honor the dead. But, equally important, to care for the living.”
The president ordered flags on federal property lowered to half staff for five days and then led the moment of communal mourning for those lost to a virus that often prevents people from gathering to remember their loved ones.
Monday’s threshold of 500,000 deaths was playing out against contradictory crosscurrents: an encouraging drop in coronavirus cases and worries about the spread of more contagious variants.
Experts warn that about 90,000 more deaths are likely in the next few months, despite a massive campaign to vaccinate people. Meanwhile, the nation’s trauma continues to accrue in a way unparalleled in recent American life, said Donna Schuurman of the Dougy Center for Grieving Children & Families in Portland, Oregon.
“In a way, we’re all grieving,” said Schuurman, who has counseled the families of those killed in terrorist attacks, natural disasters and school shootings.
In recent weeks, virus deaths have fallen from more than 4,000 reported on some days in January to an average of fewer than 1,900 per day.
Still, at half a million, the toll recorded by Johns Hopkins University is already greater than the population of Miami or Kansas
City, Missouri. It is roughly equal to the number of Americans killed in World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War combined. It is akin to a 9/11 every day for nearly six months.
After he spoke, the president along with first lady Jill Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff stood outside the White House for a moment of silence at sundown. Black bunting draped the doorway they walked through.
Five hundred lit candles — each standing for 1,000 people lost — illuminated the stairways on either side of them as the Marine Band played a rendition of “Amazing Grace.”
The milestone comes just over a year after the first confirmed U.S. fatality from the coronavirus. The pandemic has since swept across the world and the United States, stressing the nation’s health care system, rattling its economy and rewriting the rules of everyday society.
The COVID-19 death total in the United States had just crossed 400,000 when Biden took the oath of office. An additional 100,000 have died in the past month.
Biden has deliberately set expectations low — particularly on vaccinations and when the nation can return to normal — knowing he could land a political win by exceeding them. He is on track to far exceed his initial promise to deliver 100 million vaccinations in his first 100 days, with some public health experts now urging him to set a far more ambitious goal.
The administration says it expects to have enough vaccine available for every American by the end of July.