The United States just passed a grim statistic on Monday with over 500,000 Covid deaths. President Biden asked Americans to honor those lost to the virus with a moment of silence at sunset. Flags at all federal buildings were also ordered to be kept at half-mast for five days.

In the five weeks preceding this new death marker, 100,000 people died from the virus, making it more deadly to Americans than other leading diseases such as heart disease and cancer.

According to Johns Hopkins University, around 2,000 people die from the disease daily. While this is lower than the all-time high of 4,400, the number of daily deaths still compounds to a staggeringly large number.

Dr. Jones, the former president of the American Public Health Association, remarked that the country had done little to come to terms with the number of deaths people have faced.

She talked about how “we cannot think these people are disposable and dispensable and that we can just get along very well without them.” This idea played an important role in Biden’s public honoring of the covid victims.

The death count in the United States is significantly higher than in other countries, which can be largely attributed to the scattered response of the previous administration. Experts point out how the United States had the luxury of time to create a plan to fight the virus but failed to do so, resulting in the suffering and deaths of over half a million people.

Looking to the future, the country still has a long way to go to fully recover from the virus. The case rates and death rates are expected to drop as a massive public vaccination campaign sweeps across the nation. However, this is all a slow process, and the United States is still forecasted to reach 600,000 covid deaths by June 2021.