Author: CNN

Father Edduar, a Catholic priest dressed for mass, walks out of the building to greet family members who have come to pay their final respects — by national rule, each group is limited to five or fewer people. The driver opens the trunk to reveal a simple wooden casket. Standing behind the hearse, under a shaded carport, the mourners keep a distance. Some wear masks, or even gloves. Hugs and kisses are an uncommon sight.

From start to finish, the blessings and prayers take barely five minutes. Father Edduar douses the sealed casket with holy water before a pair of staff emerge to load it onto a gurney and roll it inside. Then, it’s all over. There is no eulogy, no visitation, no public burial. There’s hardly even time for a goodbye.

As the hearse pulls away, another takes its place moments later. The brief ceremonies are almost as constant as the stream of heat escaping from the crematorium’s chimney, occasionally turning to dark smoke against the hazy sky.

It is a strange scene, even for one of the largest cemeteries in Western Europe, whose rolling hills of endless headstones have been there through famine, civil war and the Spanish flu.

This is what the public mourning process looks like under Spain’s coronavirus state of emergency, which has kept Spaniards homebound, with few exceptions, for three weeks already — with at least another three still to go.

“You can see it in their faces, the great pain,” says Father Edduar, in his Venezuelan accent. Not only have people lost a loved one, they’re having to say goodbye with very few others around. Some people stream the brief curb-sid e-service on their phones for extended family and friends to share in the moment. Still, it’s not the final send-off that anyone would wish for.

With churches closed nation-wide, this is one of the few places where Spain’s majority-Catholic population can see a priest in person.

“I try to be close to them. I tell them I’m with them and that they’re not alone. Sometimes it upsets me. I cry,” says Father Edduar. The risk of contracting the virus is not lost on him either. He doesn’t wear a mask or gloves. “It might sound a bit strange, but in this historic moment, I consider this a privilege… my life is for the people — to be with them in this crucial moment.”

Spain has been hit harder by the coronavirus pandemic than almost any other country on earth. Madrid is the epicenter of its outbreak, accounting for 40% of Spain’s coronavirus deaths.

Even with blanket nationwide adoption of stringent mitigation efforts, between 100,000 and 240,000 Americans could face death in the coming weeks in a cascading nationwide ordeal, according to modeling explained by senior members of the President’s emergency task force Tuesday.

It is in the nature of the presidency, that the commander-in-chief sometimes has to deliver grave news to the nation.

George W. Bush had to narrate the horror of the 9/11 attacks in 2001. Ronald Reagan movingly eulogized shuttle astronauts after a 1986 disaster. And John Kennedy kept his nerve to address the nation during a showdown with the Soviet Union over Cuba that threatened to erupt in nuclear war.

But no president for many decades has had to level with his country over such a sudden impending loss of American life in a medical emergency as Trump is now being forced to do — after apparently coming to terms about the extent of the crisis himself.

It was not the first time that administration experts modeled the staggering possible death toll. But the combination of the President’s unusually serious demeanor and the ominous curve charts of his top public health officials struck a note of alarm missing from Trump’s previous knockabout briefings.

The stark spectacle of a president, especially one who spent weeks dismissing the virus, warning of the imminent demise of so many Americans encapsulated the scale of the crisis.

“I want every American to be prepared for the hard days that lie ahead. We’re going to go through a very tough two weeks,” the President said in the White House briefing room.

Trump’s briefing mostly lacked the elements of self-congratulation and false hope that have characterized his heavily criticized leadership in the crisis.

To begin with, during his marathon two-hour briefing, he mostly ceded the stage to his credible lieutenants Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx, who convinced him of the seriousness of the situation over the weekend.

There have been many false dawns when Trump has failed to match the gravity of a moment during his tenure. Past behavior suggests he may struggle to maintain his unifying tone at a moment of unique national peril.

And the harrowing potential scale of the looming tragedy already have some, like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, saying lives might have been saved had Trump not spent weeks denying the severity of the approaching pandemic and adopted more aggressive actions to prepare.