A Covid Story: 100,000

100,000 lives gone to this virus....  My words don't feel sufficient, so I'll defer to The Atlantic.

From the Atlantic:

"That number—100,000 dead from the coronavirus—is hard to grasp. For those who have lost someone, the pandemic’s scope is not just a statistic; within the abstraction lies an intimately life-changing event. For the rest of us, it is a fact we must try to wrestle into perspective. One hundred thousand people is nearly the population of the city I now live in; it is a neighborhood’s worth of people in Brooklyn, my longtime home; it is perhaps 10 times the total number of people most of us will cross paths with in our entire lives. It is graveyard upon graveyard upon graveyard. It is mass burials at Hart Island, bodies stacked in refrigerated trucks outside hospitals and nursing homes. It is PTSD for the nurses and doctors in the hardest-hit areas. Mostly, it is the shocking echo that follows the loss of even one person: zero, zero, zero, zero, zero. A lament: O, O, O, O, O.

What we don’t know yet: how death on this scale will change the life of the nation, if it will. Perhaps it will lastingly affect the life of New York City—which has once again found itself at the center of a national tragedy, as it did after 9/11—but not of a small town in Arizona that goes largely unscathed.

What we do know, or ought to know: Mourning together is at least as important—more important?—to our survival as the divisive arguments about whether restoring the economy or protecting vulnerable people matters more. In this election year, every aspect of the pandemic and the nation’s response to it has been politicized, and there is no collective, top-down mourning process—an absence that is exposing the unseemly seams of our barely stitched-together society. Right now, our mourning feels individual, not collective, with fights breaking out about masks, freedom, “fake news,” and the like.

A formal feeling, as Emily Dickinson put it, sits in me, a sense of remove I want to eradicate by walking among the bodies of the living instead of sitting at home alone. What feels out of step right now is not my grief, but my distance from the community that shares it."