Washington, D.C. – Today, U.S. Senator Bob Casey (D-PA) released the following statement as the United States surpassed 200,000 COVID-19 deaths:
“Our Nation has reached another painful milestone in the COVID-19 pandemic. Two hundred thousand Americans have lost their lives to this cruel virus. Every death represents a human life lost, a family shattered, a community forever changed. We have lost parents, sisters and brothers, grandparents, friends, colleagues, classmates, neighbors and heroes on the front lines. My prayers and my deepest sympathies are with those who have lost loved ones, and those who are living with the long-term health repercussions of the virus.
It didn’t have to be this way. The Trump Administration’s failure to propose and implement an effective strategy to tackle this virus as well as the President’s failure to tell the American people the truth has driven the case and death numbers so high that the U.S., with only four percent of the world’s population, has 21 percent of the world’s deaths and 23 percent of the cases. More than six months after the United States declared a national emergency, we still do not have a national testing strategy. Our frontline workers—health care workers, grocery store workers, sanitation workers and teachers, to name just a few—still do not have an adequate supply of personal protective equipment (PPE) to protect them from this deadly virus. Week after week, seniors and people with disabilities living in nursing homes and other long-term care settings are dying by the thousands, representing roughly 40 percent of all deaths nationwide. We have now lost more Americans to COVID-19 than we did during World War I.
How many more of our fellow Americans will we lose before the Trump Administration and Senate Republicans act with the urgency that is needed?”
