San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Grim marker: 500,000 lost to COVID-19
A year ago — Feb. 26 and 27, 2020 — then-President Donald Trump said 15 people had COVID-19 but that within a couple of days the number would be close to zero and then, one day, like a miracle, it would disappear.
This combination of denial, willful ignorance, deliberate misdirection and inexcusable apathy would be propagated with maddening and deadly regularity throughout 2020. The nation’s greatest public health crisis in a century wasn’t treated as a challenge to be met and defeated with scientific expertise and public health guidance for the nation’s safety, but as an opportunity for performance theater.
There was no miraculous disappearance of COVID-19. Instead, more than 28 million Americans have been infected by the coronavirus. Last week, exactly one year after the pronouncement of this unfounded, self-serving optimism, the United States surpassed 500,000 COVID deaths.
It merits a moment of silence. Stop reading. Take a deep breath. Half a million people.
As the nation reached that tragic marker, commentators, wanting to use context to convey the size and heartbreaking tragedy of that number, likened it to the city of Atlanta being wiped out. But the flaw in that analogy is that it asks us to imagine Atlanta, or any similar sized city, disappearing at once with a half a million of its residents perishing together.
Such a sudden and horrific loss would rock us with an immediate and emotional blow. But a year’s worth of death counts — 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 of our fellow citizens dying every day from COVID — has made many of us numb to the loss and scope of suffering.
We remember being shocked when San Antonio first reported 500 new cases in a day last year. But compared with the surges we have seen over the summer and winter, 500 cases became a welcome number. We remember feeling a stunned heartbreak by the surge in obituaries last summer, and while that heartbreak endures, it is now laced with a solemn acceptance. Perhaps you feel the same way.
Unlike a year ago, though, we now have hope, even if it manifests in fits and starts. Hope in the vaccines increasingly making their way into the arms of Americans. Other signs of optimism are decreasing numbers of infections and hospitalizations.
But this optimism isn’t an invitation to be reckless, as vaccine distribution remains slow and new variants of the disease take hold.
The Institute for Health Metrics at the University of Washington in Seattle has been impressive, if disturbing, with its projections of COVID-19 deaths. In its most recent projections, the worst-case scenario is that 654,000 Americans will be dead from the virus by May 1. This assumes widespread transmission of the South African variant and people prematurely returning to pre-pandemic levels of mobility.
Its best-case scenario, in which 95 percent of Americans wear masks, is that 563,500 will be dead by May 1. The most likely scenario is 595,000 dead by May 1.
The references to pre-pandemic mobility and wearing masks is a reminder that before the arrival of vaccines, we always had the ability to minimize virus exposure and keep each other safe by following public health guidelines.
This never should have been politicized. What is so haunting about the more than 500,000 deaths to COVID is knowing it didn’t have to be like this.
The contrast between intensity and duration of COVID’s pain in the United States to experiences in countries such as South Korea, New Zealand and Australia is stark. We never truly unified as a nation to quash the virus by masking up and taking it seriously.
Pandemic fatigue is a term most of us had never heard of before 2020, but is now pervasive in our lives. We feel it, too.
But we can’t become lax when we’re so close to putting the worst days of the pandemic behind us. One way to honor the 500,000 Americans lost to COVID is to let that number be the last tragic milestone of the pandemic.