COVID-19: Americans Spend Easter Sunday at Home as Deaths Hit 20,500

• COVID-19: Americans Spend Easter Sunday at Home as Deaths Hit 20,500

Americans celebrate Easter Sunday at home as the number of deaths due to coronavirus pandemic crossed 20,500 with more than half a million confirmed cases.

With almost all the country under stay-at-home orders to curb the spread of the disease, many turned to online church services to mark the holiest day in the Christian calendar.

“Future generations will look back on this as the long Lent of 2020, a time when disease and death suddenly darkened the whole earth,” Archbishop Jose Gomez of Los Angeles wrote to priests and parishioners nationwide, urging them to hold steadfast. “Our churches may be closed but Christ is not quarantined and his Gospel is not in chains.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci pointed on Sunday to the New York metropolitan area, which had its highest daily death toll last week alongside a decrease in hospitalizations, intensive care admissions and the need to intubate critically ill patients.

“Once you turn that corner, hopefully you’ll see a very sharp decline and then you can start thinking about how we can keep it that way,” Fauci said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

“If all of a sudden we decide ‘OK, it’s May whatever,’ and we just turn the switch on, that could be a real problem.”