President Joe Biden announced the grim milestone in a speech.

This morning, United States President Joe Biden gave a speech announcing that the country had passed an unfortunate milestone: since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic two years ago, over 1 million US citizens have died either due to the virus itself or complications related to it.

“Today, we mark a tragic milestone: one million American lives lost to COVID-19. One million empty chairs around the dinner table. Each an irreplaceable loss. Each leaving behind a family, a community, and a nation forever changed because of this pandemic. Jill and I pray for each of them,” Biden said in a statement. “As a nation, we must not grow numb to such sorrow. To heal, we must remember.”

“It’s a very sad and tragic landmark to reach the point of a million deaths in this really extraordinary experience that we’ve all gone through over the last two and a half years,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, told GBH News. “Hopefully, the enormity of that number would spur us on to do whatever we can to make sure that we don’t have as bad a time in the coming months and years.”

The current number of COVID-related deaths is now roughly equivalent to the entire population of San Jose, California. “If you were to tell people that an American city had been wiped off the face of the earth, people would be shocked and horrified. But since this has been a kind of a gradual burn over two years, we’ve gotten so used to hearing the headlines and so tired of having to deal with a pandemic. That sense of horror and devastation has been lost,” Dr. David Dowdy of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health told ABC News.

Biden has ordered the White House flag poles moved to half-mast in remembrance of the lost.