SORROWFUL DEATH TOLL
WASHINGTON — COVID-19 deaths in the United States surpassed 500,000 on Monday, the latest desolate way station in a vast landscape of loss.
The toll is hard to fathom. It’s as if all the people in a city the size of Atlanta or Sacramento simply vanished. The number is greater than the combined U.S. battlefield deaths
in both world wars and Vietnam. Last month, based on average 24-hour fatality counts, it was as if the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, had happened every single day.
“You see that number, and it’s not just another number,” said Bettina Gonzales, 39, whose 61-year-old father, David Gonzales, a popular football and basketball coach in Harlingen, Texas, died in August. “It’s a lot of tragedy that goes behind that number.”
Recorded COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. account for about one-fifth of the world’s nearly 2.5 million known fatalities from the disease, twice as many as in Brazil, the next-hardest-hit country. California alone accounts for almost 50,000 deaths, about 10% of the country’s total.
President Joe Biden, marking the sorrowful milestone Monday evening, urged the nation to honor the dead by observing public health measures to help bring an end to the pandemic.
“The people we lost were extraordinary. They spanned generations. Born in America, immigrated to America. But just like that, so many of them took their last breath alone in America,” he said in remarks at the White House. “We have to resist becoming numb to the sorrow. We have to resist viewing each life as a statistic.”
Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, along with their spouses, then stood in silence amid 500 candles — to commemorate 500,000 dead — placed along the steps of the South Portico. The Marine band performed “Amazing Grace.”
Poets and philosophers — and socialscience researchers — know that enormous numbers of deaths can become abstractions. For America as a whole, that may be so; for those touched by individual grief, it’s the opposite.
People who have lost loved ones or have suffered lasting physical harm from an episode of COVID-19 sometimes speak of feeling stranded on the far side of a great chasm, alienated from compatriots who wonder when they will be able to go back to bars and baseball games.
Among millions of mourners, some can still scarcely believe that a loved one who had survived so much else was swept away.
Ralph Hakman, a Holocaust survivor, was vigorous into his 90s. But in the pandemic’s early days, he suddenly fell ill and died March 22, 12 days after his 95th birthday.
“If not for COVID, I really believe he would have lived past 100,” said his 89-year-old widow, Barbara Zerulik, who was sickened around the same time as Hakman and diagnosed with COVID-19. Her husband was not tested for the virus, but doctors believe it killed him.
Born in Poland to an Orthodox Jewish family, Hakman survived three years in Auschwitz before immigrating to the U.S. He raised two children in Beverly Hills, California, with his first wife, also a Holocaust survivor.
“He survived such brutal hatred and violence when he was young — he was so strong,” said Zerulik, who spent months in the hospital and rehabilitative care before moving to Jacksonville, Florida, to live with her daughter. “Then this disease brought him down.”
Public figures reached into history to find parallels for these soul-trying times. Biden’s chief medical adviser, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said Sunday in a television interview that half a million deaths is like nothing “we have ever been through in the last 102 years, since the 1918 influenza pandemic.” U.S. deaths then were a cataclysmic 675,000, though dwarfed by a worldwide toll of 50 million.
Over the past year, the pandemic has left few American lives unscathed. All the ways in which society organizes itself have changed, in some instances irrevocably.