LOS ANGELES (KNX) — “I am appalled, I am stunned,” TV icon Oprah Winfrey told Los Angeles Times reporter Marissa Evans in an interview published Friday. “I don’t recognize a country where you’ve lost nearly a million people and there hasn’t been some form of remembering that is significant.”
According to Johns Hopkins University, 993,591 people in the U.S. have died of COVD-19 since the start of the pandemic in March 2020.
“I mean that there hasn’t been a communal gathering where there is acknowledgment that this has happened to us,” Winfrey continued. “Who are we that there is no acknowledgment, profoundly, in our society that we have lost our loved ones? And at times, we’re not even able to bury our dead. Who are we that we don’t recognize the significance of that acknowledgment?”
U.S. President Joe Biden asked people to take a moment of silence during a speech in February 2021 – less than a year into the pandemic – for the 500,000 lives the virus had claimed at that time. However, NPR noted at the end of 2021 that he pulled back on mentions of COVID-19 deaths as the year progressed.
This February, Biden released a statement marking the 900,000 American lives lost to COVID-19 at that time.
“They were beloved mothers and fathers, grandparents, children, brothers and sisters, neighbors, and friends. Each soul is irreplaceable,” he said of the deceased. “We pray for the loved ones they have left behind, and together we keep every family enduring this pain in our hearts.”
The following month, Biden briefly referenced COVID deaths during a State of the Union address.
“You know, we’ve lost so much in COVID-19. Time with one another. The worst of all, the much loss of life,” he said, before discussing the political polarization around the pandemic.
As the omicron variant was fueling an increase of U.S. COVID-19 cases in January, a Pew Research Center poll found that Democrats were more than twice as likely as Republicans to believe coronavirus was a major threat to the health of the population as a whole. According to an Ipsos poll conducted in March, 49% of Republicans are extremely or very concerned about the coronavirus outbreak compared to 80% of Democrats.
“Let’s use this moment to reset,” Biden said last month. “So, stop looking at COVID as a partisan dividing line. See it for what it is: a God-awful disease.”
The Ipsos poll found that while people are concerned about COVID-19, very few considered it a crisis in March. In fact, only 9% describe the state of the coronavirus in the U.S. as “a serious crisis” and 17% didn’t see it as a problem at all. Most people (73%) saw it as a manageable problem.
In April new case numbers have steadily gone up, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data.
Even though vaccination efforts and COVID-19 treatments such as Pfizer’s oral antiviral pill have helped reduce deaths, Winfrey told L.A. Times’ Evans – a Black woman who lost her father to COVID-19 – that she is still haunted by those we have already lost, particularly people of color.
“Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, analyses of federal, state, and local data have shown that people of color have experienced a disproportionate burden of cases and deaths,” according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
One story that resonated with Winfrey was about 56-year-old Gary Fowler, a Black man who went to three metro Detroit hospital emergency rooms in the weeks leading up to his death, begging for a coronavirus test. Before dying, he wrote in a journal that he could not breathe.
“I would want people to know at the last minute what I was feeling, what I was thinking, so I’d be probably journaling what those feelings were so that my family would have an idea of what exactly had happened,” Winfrey said.
Fowler’s story inspired her to create “The Color of Care,” documentary about how COVID-19 has exposed racial inequities in the health system. Winfrey’s Harpo Productions helped produce the documentary for The Smithsonian Channel. Directed by award-winning filmmaker Yance Ford, it features interviews with families of color who lost loved ones to COVID-19.
“What saddens me most is there hasn’t been an acknowledgment about what we’ve been through,” said Winfrey. “So to grade us on how well we did or didn’t do, or what should have been done, actually, I don’t think at this point serves a purpose. I’m just trying to move forward.”
Some other countries have created memorial tributes for those lost to COVID-19. According to DW News, March 18 is marked as a day of remembrance for those lost in Italy. In the U.K., “The National COVID Memorial Wall” can be found in London, painted with hearts.
Apart from Winfrey, others have championed for more acknowledgement for people we have lost due to the pandemic in the U.S., including the grassroots group Marked by COVID, which has called for a national holiday and permanent memorials.
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