A million reasons to pass COVID funding

If history is where yesterday breathes, it is also where we pause and reflect. One day, years from now, we will see this era through a different lens, with less pain and sorrow and heartbreak. But we are not there — not yet. The United States has reached a staggering milestone, 1 million dead from COVID-19. This includes 5,320 people in San Antonio, according to data from Metro Health.

“We haven’t faced death at this magnitude in our country in a long period of time, ” U.S. Rep. Greg Stanton, D-ariz., told National Public Radio.

Stanton, the former mayor of Phoenix, is sponsoring a House resolution to support a COVID memorial day as a way to face the trauma associated with the pandemic, an effort coinciding with the work of a private group lobbying for a national memorial day on the first Monday of March each year.

“I know that a key to healing from trauma is to hold space, to feel what you need to feel, and to do this in community,” said Janeth

Nuñez del Prado, a social worker and trauma therapist who is helping to lead the project.

As with all fatalities, the impact of these deaths has spiraled beyond the deceased. Loved ones must live with the grief — and the guilt of surviving. Mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters — all brokenhearted, their lives forever altered.

We’ve long referred to the virus as unseen, but its effects are all around us in lives lost or altered, anxiety and tension, mental health effects of a long two years.

It’s been estimated 9 million Americans have lost loved ones to the pandemic, the Washington Post reported. COVID-19 was the No. 3 killer in 2020, according to federal statistics. Only cancer and heart disease killed more.

Throughout the country, it can feel like the menace of the pandemic is fading. Many workers have returned to the office, and masks have come off in many settings. We saw and heard the whoops of joy when mask mandates for air travel ended.

But appearances can be deceiving. While life is returning to normal for many Americans, it may never be normal again for millions of others. And the nation will likely soon be facing another COVID wave.

The Biden administration warns that COVID-19 could infect 100 million Americans this fall and winter.

Officials did not offer new data or make formal projections. The forecast was based on outside models of the pandemic, and many factors could alter the course of the virus.

“It’s always hard to predict the future when it comes to COVID, but I think we’re at a point now where it’s even harder than normal,” said Justin Lessler, an epidemiologist at University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health. “Because there’s so much sensitivity, in terms of these long-term trends, to things we don’t understand exactly about the virus and about (human) behavior.”

The pandemic started in early 2020, and we really felt its impact in March of that year. Since then, many of us have felt love and rage, grace and sorrow, hope and triumph, fatigue.

And what have we learned during that time?

One thing is that, along with masks and vaccines, courage is one of the most effective weapons against this disease. Our health care workers have shown us this. Records are spotty, but Kaiser Health News reported that more than 2,900 of these workers died in 2020.

President Joe Biden requested $22.5 billion in supplemental COVID-19 relief funding, money earmarked for testing, treatment and therapeutics. The total amount was rejected, but negotiators reached agreement on a scaled-back $10 billion package. Congress left Washington in April without passing the bill.

Discussions were undermined by haggling after the president sought to end Title 42, the policy allowing the expulsion of immigrants based on pandemic health restrictions. Placing politics above public health has been a hallmark of the pandemic.

There are 1 million reasons to do the right thing and pass this funding package.

Nation hits a heartbreaking pandemic milestone