OUT OF SIGHT, OUT OF MIND
Because we don't physically see mounting COVID deaths, many are becoming numb to the crisis
When Todd Klindt buried his dad, he was stunned. Some mourners arrived not wearing masks — for the funeral of a man killed by the coronavirus.
Just days earlier, Klindt had held his father's hand in a hospital intensive care unit. Now, watching people at the funeral — acting as if the world were not on fire, as if people were not dying by the dozen every hour of every day — he wanted to shout, “He's right here!”
“I'm like, `Are you paying attention at all? Is any of this sinking in?' ” said Klindt, who lives in Ames, Iowa.
Death is now everywhere and yet nowhere. We track its progress in daily bar graphs. We note its latest victims among celebrities and acquaintances. Yet, in many parts of the U.S., some of us carry on — debating holiday plans, the necessity of mask mandates, how seriously to take the virus, whether it's all a hoax.
In the face of one of the biggest mass casualty events in U.S. history, we are growing increasingly numb to death, experts say — numb to the crisis and tragedy it represents and to the action it requires in response.
Something happens in the brain when fatalities reach such high numbers, say psychologists who have studied genocides and mass disasters. The casualties become like a mountain of corpses that has grown so large it becomes difficult to focus on the individual bodies.
With the coronavirus in particular, experts say, the deaths have been hidden from sight even from friends and family — the human cost sequestered in hospitals and nursing homes.
“Sometimes I think, if only others could see what we see every day,” said Joan Schaum, a hospice nurse who has spent the past year caring for the dying in Lancaster, Pa.
“Other times,” she said, “I think, no one should have to see the amount of death and suffering going on right now. It changes you. It stays with you.”
In 1994, soldiers and militias from a rival ethnic group murdered hundreds of thousands in Rwanda in the space of weeks. In response, the United States and much of the world largely shrugged. Then-u. S. president Bill Clinton later called his administration's failure to act one of his great regrets.
Puzzled by that apathy, psychologist Paul Slovic began conducting experiments to better understand people's reaction to mass suffering and death. What he found was troubling.
In one study, his researchers showed people a picture of a seven-year-old girl dying of starvation and asked for donations to help her. He showed another group two starving children, then even larger sets of children. Slovic found people's distress didn't grow with the number of children in danger, but often shrank.
“In fact, the more who die, sometimes the less we care,” Slovic said. In greater numbers, death becomes impersonal, and people feel increasingly hopeless that their actions can have any effect.
“Statistics are human beings with tears dried off,” Slovic said. “And that's dangerous because we need tears to motivate us.”
With the coronavirus — the U.S. death toll past 346,000, more than 15,600 in Canada and more than 1.82 million worldwide — many of our strongest impulses are working against us, experts say.
“Think about the disasters that have captured our national attention. … A hurricane like Katrina hits. News crews show the devastation, and people open their wallets,” said Lori Peek, who directs the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Colo. “But this pandemic isn't a camera-ready event like that.”
Instead of a single shocking event — like the Twin Towers collapsing on 9/11 — the pandemic has unfolded as an invisible, slow-creeping, chronic hazard. Over time, our brains gradually tune out the danger.
“You don't see people trapped on rooftops like Katrina,” Peek said. “You don't have homes going up in flames like in wildfires.”
Without visual, physical manifestations of deaths, the alarm bells in our heads fail to ring. Because we don't see the deaths, we fail to see their connection to us — including our role in preventing their growing numbers.
This is what death in the pandemic looks like up close: Patients often grow ashen as their body struggles for nutrients. Their skin becomes mottled with splotches of reddish purple as their heart pumps less and less blood to parts of the body that need it.
“The hardest thing about it is how alone they are in the end,” said Schaum, a nurse with Hospice & Community Care in Lancaster, Pa.
Schaum props up the feet of dying patients to take the pressure off their heels. She uses a gel to moisten their mouths, which grow uncomfortably dry once they stop eating or drinking.
Even those interactions are limited: Schaum is supposed to keep direct contact to 10 to 15 minutes during her daily patient check-ins. So, from six feet away, she talks to them, even when they are unresponsive, hoping they sense her presence.
When families are unable to be there, Laura Carey, a social worker for Hospice & Community Care, sometimes sits with COVID-19 patients during their last moments.
It's frustrating, Carey said, trying to hold a patient's hand while layered in goggles, masks, face shield, gloves and gown — unable to make skin-to-skin contact normally used to reassure the dying.
As patients' hands grow cold and lose sensation, Carey often places her hand on their shoulder or head to make sure they know someone is there.
She tells patients she has talked with their family and how much they are loved.
She sits quietly beside them as their breath slows and becomes increasingly shallow and irregular, until it stops.
“There's something so incredibly sacred and powerful about that moment,” Carey said. “If only others could experience it, maybe things would be different.”