Joe Biden is set to mark the latest milestone of Covid’s deaths in the U.S. Monday night, with a candlelit reminder and a moment of silence for the 500,000 who lost their lives.
With the heartfelt landmark approaching, the White House is preparing for a sunset celebration with a focus on those who have died and their loved ones. With his wife, Jill Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, by his side, the president is expected to be a replica of the memorial held for Covid’s victims at Lincoln Monument the night before it was established.
He then said: “To heal we must remember.”
Incidents like this suddenly close the huge gap in approach and levels of sympathy between Biden and his predecessor in the Oval Office. Donald Trump rarely talked about the hundreds of thousands who died on his watch. When he did, he was generally proud of the success of his administration in fighting the pandemic.
Last April, Trump estimated that 60,000 people could die from the virus – a measure of how wrong he was, with the new situation.
That milestone was crossed later in April. Now a much closer landmark would be the 675,000 who died in the U.S. as a result of the 1918 Spanish pandemic, a death toll that was once unbelievable from Covid-19 but is now glaringly on the horizon.
Seasonal medical experts who have been battling infectious diseases for decades have said they are openly disappointed when more than half a million people die. Anthony Fauci, the public face of the U.S. response to Trump-sided coronavirus but Biden’s chief medical adviser, suddenly described the milestone as “horrific”.
As a sign of the jitters holding the country, Fauci, the leading U.S. infectious disease expert, warned Americans that they may have to continue wearing masks into 2022.
Asked Peter Hotez, a global health scientist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston Twitter: “How did we get to this horrible place?” Answering his own question, he said that one important feature of Trump’s “anti-science disinfection campaign” was “the introduction of epilepsy, claiming to be a false and misleading one.” it was ”.
Against such a dark backdrop, Biden administration is steadily moving towards achieving the stated goal of a 100m vaccine within the first 100 days. The latest figures show that more than 60m doses of vaccine have been placed in people’s arms, with around 13% of the US population receiving one picture and nearly 6% two.
The effect of the vaccination program is clearly visible, with signs that the pandemic has passed. Data compiled by Johns Hopkins University showed a nearly 30% decline in the weekly load of new cases in the U.S., the fastest decline in the week since the outbreak began.
But with the reported daily count of new cases still running at more than 55,000, and deaths at more than 1,000 per day, no one is in a hurry to name the health crisis. New variants of the virus are still a cause for concern, with at least seven identified within the US.
The most promising aspect of the current picture is the Biden administration ‘s obvious decision to avoid the mistakes of the past. Where Trump sat back, passing the buck largely to states that followed a mosaic of different and often contradictory strategies, Biden has stuck to active with the federal government in circulating vaccines.
The president has brought the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Fema, to the center of work with responsibility for coordinating vaccination efforts. He has guided the federal response to prioritize the opening of vaccination centers in black, Latino and other minority communities where Covid has been horrified but vaccination rates have been relatively low.
The approach, which has led to federal support for vaccine sites in hard-hit communities, is very different from Trump’s model. As one Fema official told NBC News: “Anything Trump has done, we are doing the opposite.”
Despite the difference in approaches, racial differences continue to plague Covid’s U.S. experience. Newly released data show that Latino and black Americans are getting the vaccine at much lower rates than white Americans, even though they have suffered the worst health effects since pandemic.
Like Sharrelle Barber, an epidemiologist specifically concerned with racial inequality and health, put it: “500,000 souls in the US … Our shared humanity wants us to mourn, but also to fight against the systems of violence created by the avoidable and unjust deaths is unfair.