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Covid-19 in the U.S.: How can we grasp the significance of “200,000 deaths”?

In a departure from our usual practice of analyzing articles from foreign countries, today we reproduce an article from The Trenchant Observer, with permission.

Covid-19 in the U.S.: How can we grasp the significance of “200,000 deaths”?, originally published in The Trenchant Observer, September 12. 2020.

Test of original article

Within a a few days, the U.S. death toll for Covid-19 will pass 200,000.

How can we get our minds around that? We were deeply shocked in 2001 when some 3,000 people were killed in the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers in New York City. One of my closest friends worked in one of the towers, and I felt certain that he was dying as I watched on television as the second plane crashed into the second tower. That personal connection brought home the immense magnitude of the loss, and I myself entered into a period of intense grief and loss. Then, miraculously, I learned that he had been on a business trip in Los Angeles, and was alive.

Absent such a personal connection, it is hard to appreciate the significance of the number 200,000. While my partner has lost an elderly uncle in a foreign country, and the mother of one of her best friends died in a nursing home in Los Angeles, I didn’t personally know these people. The loss was harder for my partner, who knew them and who had been very close to her uncle as she was growing up.

We can watch on the PBS Newshour nightly tributes to the lives of a small number of victims of Covid-19. But that doesn’t really help us understand the number 200,000.

In the early stages of the pandemic many of us were deeply moved by the stories of the first victims and their families, and of the doctors and nurses who, trying to save the lives of other victims, themselves succumbed to this insidious disease.

But over time we tend to become numb, We tend to lose the ability to grasp the difference between 30,000 deaths and 50,000, or 100,000 deaths, or 200,000 deaths, a milestone we will pass within days. Predictions are that we may lose a total of 415,000 people by January, 2021.

Who can grasp it?

Yet it is important. There are political leaders who by attacking science and the measures the medical experts have strongly urged, are very directly responsible for tens of thousands of these deaths. They should be help accountable. The cry for accountability is even greater when they persist in the lack of leadership and anti-science modelling of behavior which is currently contributing–NOW–to tens of thousands of new deaths.

We need to invent a new vocabulary and a new imagery to depict the enormity of the human catastrophe that is unfolding before our eyes. This calamity is taking place in real time, not only in the United States but also in other countries throughout the world.

Leaders who are attacking science and measures medical experts tell us are indispensable to save tens or hundreds of thousands of lives are in effect committing horrendous crimes–crimes which one day may be recognized as “crimes against humanity”.


“Defending the Right to Life and Other Human Rights During the Coronavirus Pandemic,” Lawyers for Humanity, May 7, 2020.

Leaders, of course, are not the only ones committing such crimes.

What can be done to stop this defiance of medical science and the guidance of medical experts regarding social restrictions (e.g., physical distancing and the wearing of masks) necessary to halt the spread of Covid-19, and the increasing death toll which such defiance causes?

That is the question of the hour.

The answer is not clear. But to begin the process of answering this question, each and every American should begin every day with a long reflection and meditation on the number 200,000.

The Trenchant Observer

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