President Joe Biden marked the grim milestone of one million deaths in the United States from the Chinese coronavirus with a prepared statement and prayers delivered Thursday morning.
“As a nation, we must not grow numb to such sorrow,” Biden said. “To heal, we must remember. We must remain vigilant against this pandemic and do everything we can to save as many lives as possible.”
He said it was “critical” for Congress to fund resources like testing, vaccines and treatments while acknowledging the dead by saying “Jill and I pray for each of them.”
AFP reports in recent weeks the U.S. has seen an uptick in the number of daily virus cases, largely due to the new Omicron subvariant.
“I think we are in a place where psychologically and socially and economically, people are largely done with the pandemic,” said Celine Gounder, an infectious disease expert at New York University.
“(But) the pandemic is not over. So you have a disconnect between what is happening epidemiologically and what’s happening in terms of how people are responding,” she told AFP.
America recorded its first coronavirus death, on the West Coast, in early February 2020. By the next month, the virus was ravaging the nation and the White House was predicting up to 240,000 deaths nationwide.
The coronavirus has now killed more than 995,000 people in the U.S. and at least 6.2 million people globally, according to figures kept by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization.
Biden will appeal for a renewed international commitment to attacking coronavirus later on Thursday as he convenes a second virtual summit on the pandemic.