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Severe weather and tornadoes that began Easter Sunday and continued into today have cut a deadly swath through parts of Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee.

At least 26 people have been killed and hundreds of homes and businesses have destroyed. More than a million people have been left without electricity.

As of Monday afternoon, approximately 25 million people along the East Coast were under a tornado watch until 6pm ET, according to CNN meteorologist Dave Hennen said.

“Damaging winds of up to 70 mph and a few tornadoes are possible,” he said.

Washington DC, Delaware, Maryland, northern Virginia, the West Virginia panhandle, New Jersey and central and eastern Pennsylvania could be the next places at risk in the damaging storms.

The National Weather Service said there have been reports of at least 40 tornadoes across a span of more than 1,200 miles from Texas to South Carolina.

The “normal” challenges of dealing with a disaster such as this are complicated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Emergency officials have told people that finding a safe place to shelter should take precedence over social distancing.

In Mississippi, where at least 11 people were killed by the storms, the state’s Emergency Management Agency tweeted that people should have a safe place to go — and if that’s a public shelter, they should still attempt to practice social distancing.

But the message from all states being threatened by the storms is practice social distancing if you can, but by all means, protect yourself from something that could kill you instantly – first.

While weather-related events can cause mass destruction of property, the death toll is mercifully low. The three most deadly weather events in the last 5 years have been the 2018 California wildfires (106 killed), Hurricane Irma in 2017 (97 killed) and Hurricane Harvey in 2017 (89 deaths)

The daily U.S. death toll from the coronavirus has dipped for the second straight day, but the total is still over 28,000.

What makes this so very concerning is the speed with which the death toll has mounted, and the uncertainty as to how long this pandemic will last, including the disruption to our normal every day activities.

But for those Americans who just lost a loved one in a deadly tornado or whose house has been destroyed by the storm, there is only one statistic that matters and our hearts are heavy with you…