Day 33: 500,000

With the United States surpassing 500,000 Covid-19-related deaths today, and with a disproportionate rate among the nation’s racial minorities and impoverished, President Joe Biden, First Lady Jill Biden, Kamala Harris and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff stood for a moment of silence at the White House.

“I remember,” Biden said in remarks delivered before the candlelight vigil at the South Portico, decorated with 500 candles and the U.S. flags at half staff. At one moment he shows visible emotion — disgust or disdain perhaps for what’s occurred — and gently shakes his head as a live band played “Amazing Grace.”

He began his speech with the official count, which he keeps on a card kept in his breast pocket and updated daily. “500,071 dead. That’s more Americans who’ve died in one year in this pandemic than in World War I, World War II and the Vietnam War combined. That’s more lives lost to this virus than any other nation on this Earth.”

He then spoke to the “survivor’s remorse, the anger, the questions of faith in your soul. For some of you it’s been a year, a week, a day, an hour, and I know that when you stare at that empty chair around the kitchen table, it brings it all back no matter how long ago it happened.

“… So many of the rituals that help us cope and help us honor those we loved haven’t been available to us,” Biden acknowledged, referencing the effects of the pandemic. “… As a nation, we cannot, and we must not, let this go on. That’s why the day before my inauguration, at the Covid-19 memorial at the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall I said, ‘To heal, we must remember.’ I know it’s hard, I promise you, I know it’s hard but that’s how you heal, you have to remember.”

Five-hundred thousand in a year is nearly one death per minute.

“For those who have lost loved ones, this is what I know,” he said, “they’re never truly gone, they’ll always be part of your heart… 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. We will get through this I promise you.”

Earlier this week, on Sunday, Dr. Fauci said we may need to look to 2022 for a return to a mask-less day.