It is time to bid a gentle and grateful farewell to Bernie Sanders’s quest for the presidency.

On Tuesday, even as the coronavirus pandemic roiled the primaries and kept some voters away from the polls, Joe Biden swept to victory in three states — Illinois, Arizona and Florida. The results were not close. In Florida, with 219 delegates on the line, Mr. Biden bested Mr. Sanders by some 40 points, winning every county in the state. In Illinois, with its 155 delegates, his margin of victory topped 20 points.

The harder you look at the math and at the voting coalition that Mr. Biden has put together, the harder it is to see a way for Mr. Sanders to make a comeback. On Wednesday morning, his campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, announced that the candidate would be “having conversations with supporters to assess his campaign.”

Such conversations are tough for any candidate. For Mr. Sanders, who has inspired a passionate following with his image as an unbending fighter, dropping out would be all the more excruciating. Even as his electoral prospects have dimmed, many of his supporters have urged him to stay in the race — to keep his ideological vision and his revolution alive.

If anything, they see the coronavirus crisis, and the economic havoc it is wreaking, as an argument to keep Mr. Sanders’s voice front and center, arguing for the interests of the people over the powerful. And with a growing number of states postponing voting out of health concerns, some of Mr. Sanders’s allies see an opening to keep the cause alive a bit longer. Mr. Shakir suggested that a decision about dropping out was not imminent, noting that “the next primary contest is at least three weeks away.”