(Washington) The bells of the Washington National Cathedral rang 1,000 times Monday in tribute to the victims of COVID-19, as the United States is on the way to crossing the milestone of one million deaths linked to the pandemic.
Posted at 6:35 p.m.
The United States is the country that has officially recorded the most deaths in the world, ahead of Brazil, India and even Russia, and had more than 995,000 deaths from COVID-19 on Monday, according to the latest report from the ‘Johns Hopkins University.
The cathedral’s bumblebee was triggered around 6 p.m. in a new tribute streamed live on YouTube, with each ring representing 1,000 people who have died due to the pandemic.
The building’s funeral bell has previously rung when the United States passed other symbolic milestones, for example in September 2020, when the country passed 200,000 dead.
“Today our nation passed a tragic milestone: one million Americans died from COVID-19,” said the dean of the cathedral, the Reverend Randolph Marshall Hollerith, before the bells rang.
The United States has been recording an increase in the number of daily cases for several weeks, in the context of the lifting of the wearing of masks, now simply recommended indoors for a majority of the country’s inhabitants.
The number of deaths linked to the epidemic has slowed down in recent months: the threshold of 900,000 deaths was exceeded in February, three months ago, and that of 800,000 in December, a month and a half before this date.
When the half-million dead mark was crossed in February 2021, US President Joe Biden lamented a heavier toll than “World War I, World War II and the Vietnam War combined”.
In total, the COVID-19 pandemic caused between 13 and 17 million deaths worldwide between 1er January 2020 and December 31, 2021, according to recent estimates from the World Health Organization (WHO).