Ed Yong asks the big question: why are we so blase about the nearly million COVID deaths?
The united states reported more deaths from COVID-19 last Friday than deaths from Hurricane Katrina, more on any two recent weekdays than deaths during the 9/11 terrorist attacks, more last month than deaths from flu in a bad season, and more in two years than deaths from HIV during the four decades of the AIDS epidemic. At least 953,000 Americans have died from COVID, and the true toll is likely even higher because many deaths went uncounted. COVID is now the third leading cause of death in the U.S., after only heart disease and cancer, which are both catchall terms for many distinct diseases. The sheer scale of the tragedy strains the moral imagination. On May 24, 2020, as the United States passed 100,000 recorded deaths, The New York Times filled its front page with the names of the dead, describing their loss as “incalculable.” Now the nation hurtles toward a milestone of 1 million. What is 10 times incalculable?
Many countries have been pummeled by the coronavirus, but few have fared as poorly as the U.S. Its death rate surpassed that of any other large, wealthy nation—especially during the recent Omicron surge. The Biden administration placed all its bets on a vaccine-focused strategy, rather than the multilayered protections that many experts called for, even as America lagged behind other wealthy countries in vaccinating (and boosting) its citizens—especially elderly people, who are most vulnerable to the virus. In a study of 29 high-income countries, the U.S. experienced the largest decline in life expectancy in 2020 and, unlike much of Europe, did not bounce back in 2021. It was also the only country whose lowered life span was driven mainly by deaths among people under 60. Dying from COVID robbed each American of, on average, nine years of life at the lowest end of estimates and 17 at the highest. As a whole, U.S. life expectancy fell by two years—the largest such decline in almost a century. Neither World War II nor any of the flu pandemics that followed it dented American longevity so badly.
Every American who died of COVID left an average of nine close relatives bereaved. Roughly 9 million people—3 percent of the population—now have a permanent hole in their world that was once filled by a parent, child, sibling, spouse, or grandparent. An estimated 149,000 children have lost a parent or caregiver. Many people were denied the familiar rituals of mourning—bedside goodbyes, in-person funerals. Others are grieving raw and recent losses, their grief trampled amid the stampede toward normal. “I’ve known multiple people who didn’t get to bury their parents or be with their families, and now are expected to go back to the grind of work,” says Steven Thrasher, a journalist and the author of The Viral Underclass, which looks at the interplay between inequalities and infectious diseases. “We’re not giving people the space individually or societally to mourn this huge thing that’s happened.”
After many of the biggest disasters in American memory, including 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, “it felt like the world stopped,” Lori Peek, a sociologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder who studies disasters, told me. “On some level, we owned our failures, and there were real changes.” Crossing 1 million deaths could offer a similar opportunity to take stock, but “900,000 deaths felt like a big threshold to me, and we didn’t pause,” Peek said. Why is that? Why were so many publications and politicians focused on reopenings in January and February—the fourth- and fifth-deadliest months of the pandemic? Why did the CDC issue new guidelines that allowed most Americans to dispense with indoor masking when at least 1,000 people had been dying of COVID every day for almost six straight months? If the U.S. faced half a year of daily hurricanes that each took 1,000 lives, it is hard to imagine that the nation would decide to, quite literally, throw caution to the wind. Why, then, is COVID different?
I highly recommend you read the whole thing. He points to the inequities in our system and the fact that old people and marginalized populations are more likely to get the virus and die from it as one reason, which is surely correct. He also suggests that individualism is at fault which I think may be a primary reason that explains the right’s inexplicable decision to let ‘er rip in their own lives and the lives of those around them. He quotes a medical historian who says, “Like gun violence, overdose, extreme heat death, heart disease, and smoking, [COVID] becomes increasingly associated with behavioral choice and individual responsibility, and therefore increasingly invisible.”
That’s depressing. But I have to admit that I’ve come to see this as an every man for himself kind of a problem, out of necessity. I’m happy to wear a mask or do other things to keep the community safe, but we have millions of our fellow Americans who are not willing to do the same for me. It’s a problem.
He goes on to discuss what we should be doing now, to both think about what we really are prepared to tolerate and build a better system for the next time. I highly recommend reading it. It’s bracing.
Update — Brian Buetler wrote this on twitter and I agree completely:
The only thing I’d add to this: there’s a fatalism about COVID that spans both parties, but works in different ways within each.
Among Republicans it’s an affected mechanism to cope with Trump’s atrocious abdication when first confronted with the virus. Doing more meant implying Trump hadn’t done enough, which meant crossing Trump, which meant pretending to believe this was the best we could do.
Among Dems it’s a sense that collective action is hopeless, the public will reject mitigation, the right is hopelessly ungovernable. I’m sympathetic to the institutional constraints and sabotage they’ve faced, but see little evidence internationally for the general proposition.
Which democratic governing party that handled COVID better than we did is more politically endangered because of it?
Even within the U.S., we saw at the outset an incredible level of solidarity spring up almost unbidden. Trump wrecked it because his mind is fully corrupted and he couldn’t imagine anyone responding selflessly in a crisis.
He assumed asking for collective sacrifice would blow back on him, and he was only interested in him. But I think he was just wrong; in fact I think he’d be president today if he’d done the patriotic thing, instead of lying and polarizing the country around pandemic disease.
To be sure, he shat the entire bed (can’t only do that partially) and restoring solidarity after he was gone was going to be very hard. After a few months of trying Dems deemed the challenge impossible and moved on to current policy.
The alternative would’ve entailed mobilizing the anti-COVID supermajority against the GOP (remember that one weird week when Republicans got scared of polls showing they’d grown too close to anti-vaxxers?), countering demagoguery with demagoguery, and they just wouldn’t do that.
Obviously can’t say for sure if it would’ve worked, but it was worth trying in a concerted way.
Originally tweeted by Brian Beutler (@brianbeutler) on March 8, 2022.
It illustrates much of the political dynamic in general doesn’t it?