Miami Herald

U.S. tops 500,000 deaths; Biden: Resist being numb

- BY HEATHER HOLLINGSWO­RTH AND TAMMY WEBBER

■ ‘We have to resist becoming numb to the sorrow,’ President Joe Biden said. ‘We have to resist viewing each life as a statistic or a blur.’

The COVID-19 death toll in the U.S. topped 500,000 on Monday, a staggering number that all but matches the number of Americans killed in World War II, Korea and Vietnam combined.

President Joe Biden held a sunset moment of silence and a candle-lighting ceremony at the White House and ordered American flags lowered at federal buildings for the next five days.

“We have to resist becoming numb to the sorrow,” Biden said. “We have to resist viewing each life as a statistic or a blur.”

Addressing the “grim, heartbreak­ing milestone” directly and publicly, Biden stepped to a lectern in the White House Cross Hall, unhooked his mask and delivered an emotion-filled 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.”

A president whose own life has been marked by family tragedy, Biden spoke in deeply personal terms, referencin­g his own losses as he tried to comfort the huge number of Americans whose lives have been forever changed by the pandemic.

“I know all too well. I know what it’s like to not be there when it happens,” said Biden, who has long addressed grief more powerfully than perhaps any other American public figure. “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.”

The half-million milestone, as recorded by Johns Hopkins University, comes as states redouble efforts to get the coronaviru­s vaccine into arms after last week’s winter weather closed clinics, slowed vaccine deliveries and forced tens of thousands of people to miss their shots.

Despite the rollout of vaccines since mid-December, a closely watched model from the University of Washington projects more than 589,000 dead by June 1.

The U.S. toll is by far the highest reported in the world, accounting for 20% of the nearly 2.5 million coronaviru­s deaths globally, though the true numbers are thought to be significan­tly greater, in part, because many cases were overlooked, especially early in the outbreak.

The first known deaths from the virus in the U.S. were in early February 2020. It took four months to reach the first 100,000 deaths. The toll hit 200,000 in September and 300,000 in December, then took just over a month to go from 300,000 to 400,000 and another month to climb from 400,000 to 500,000.

The U.S. recorded an estimated 405,000 deaths in World War II, 58,000 in the Vietnam War and 36,000 in the Korean War.

Average daily deaths and cases have plummeted in the past few 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.

But experts warn that dangerous variants could cause the trend to reverse itself. And some experts say not enough Americans have been inoculated yet for the vaccine to be making much of a difference.

Instead, the drop-off in deaths and cases has been attributed to the passing of the holidays; the cold and bleak days of midwinter, when many people stay home; and better adherence to mask rules and social distancing.

Dr. Ryan Stanton, an emergency-room physician in Lexington, Kentucky, who has treated scores of COVID-19 patients, said he never thought the U.S. deaths would be so high.

“I was one of those early ones that thought this may be something that may hit us for a couple months. … I definitely thought we would be done with it before we got into the fall. And I definitely didn’t see it heading off into 2021,” Stanton said.

Kristy Sourk, an intensive-care nurse at Hutchinson Regional Medical Center in Hutchinson, Kansas, said she is encouraged by the declining caseload and progress in vaccinatin­g people, but “I know we are so far from over.”

People “are still dying, and families are still isolated from their loved ones who are unable to be with them so that is still pretty heart-wrenching,” she said.

Snow, ice and weatherrel­ated power outages closed some vaccinatio­n sites and held up shipments across a large swath of the nation, including in the Deep South.

As a result, the sevenday rolling average of adminstere­d first doses fell by 20 percent between Feb. 14 and Feb. 21, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The White House said that about a third of the roughly 6 million vaccine doses delayed by bad weather were delivered over the weekend, with the rest expected to be delivered by mid-week, several days earlier than originally expected. White House coronaviru­s response coordinato­r Andy Slavitt on Monday attributed the improved timeline to an “all-out, round-the-clock” effort over the weekend that included employees at one vaccine distributo­r working night shifts to pack vaccines.

 ?? ALEX WONG Getty Images ?? From left, President Joe Biden, first lady Jill Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, participat­e in a moment of silence at sundown on the South Portico of the White House on Monday in Washington, D.C., to honor the more than 500,000 people who have been killed by COVID-19 in the U.S.
ALEX WONG Getty Images From left, President Joe Biden, first lady Jill Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, participat­e in a moment of silence at sundown on the South Portico of the White House on Monday in Washington, D.C., to honor the more than 500,000 people who have been killed by COVID-19 in the U.S.
 ?? EVAN VUCCI AP ?? President Joe Biden said Monday: ‘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.’
EVAN VUCCI AP President Joe Biden said Monday: ‘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.’

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