Big numbers have sadly been a big part of the pandemic. Yesterday, the US reached a staggering milestone, surpassing 500,000 known corona virus-related deaths. It’s a lot higher than any other country in the world. It’s impossibly hard to imagine death on such a huge scale, yet that’s the cold, hard truth. It means that more Americans have died from Covid-19 than on the battlefields of World War I, World War II and the Vietnam War combined.
“The magnitude of it is just horrifying”
One professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University who modelled the spread of the virus, says that the scale of loss was not inevitable. He says the high numbers show a failure to control the spread of Covid-19 in the United States. “It’s been a failure,” he said.
The United States is overrepresented for global Covid deaths. And we just weren’t prepared to see a sophisticated, modern country brought to its knees by a pandemic. JohnsHopkins reports that the United States has about 20 percent of the world’s known Covid deaths, despite having just 4.25 percent of the global population.
By Monday this week, the USA was reporting about 1,900 Covid deaths per day. Last year, when the world first heard numbers like this, we were appalled and horrified. After a peak in January of more than 3,300, I guess once again we’re becoming inured to big numbers.
Lower daily death rates are a relief, but it’s difficult to project the future of the pandemic due to the rise of new highly transmissible variants. Historians caution that the world must not turn away from the scale of the loss, as these are the numbers – the statistics – that will be remembered decades into the future.
