Washington:Candles were lit at the White House South Portico on the day which the number of Americans who died from Covid-19 broke the staggering record of 500,000.
“That’s more lives lost to this virus than any other nation on Earth,” US President Joe Biden said as he led a moment of silence accompanied by his wife, Jill Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and the second gentleman, Douglas Emhoff, Xinhua news agency reported.
“But as we acknowledge the scale of this mass death in America, we remember each person and the life they lived,” said the President, per whose order earlier in the day flags on top of the presidential residence and on other federal properties were lowered to half-mast.
Johns Hopkins University’s statistics showed that 500,176 American lives had been lost to Covid-19 as of 7.23 p.m. Eastern Time on Monday (0023 GMT, Tuesday), a toll far outnumbering any nation in the world.
To put the number into perspective, about one in 670 Americans have died from the virus, of which a deadly consequence is that life expectancy in the country dropped one year to 77.8 years in the first six months of 2020, according to a recent report by the National Center for Health Statistics.
