World on verge of 1M COVID deaths
LEADERS, EXPERTS FEAR VIRUS FATIGUE AS TOLL CONTINUES TO CLIMB
The United States reached a dismal milestone Tuesday, its official COVID-related death count surpassing 200,000, moving the world ever closer to one million deaths from one of the most disastrous infections the planet has seen.
As of Tuesday afternoon, the global death toll was 967,035. How do we wrap our minds around the numbers?
U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson warned Tuesday new coronavirus rules for England, which include a 10 p.m. curfew for pubs, and a plea for people to work from home again if possible, could last up to six months as the country reaches “a perilous turning point” in the pandemic.
In Madrid, a quarter of hospital beds are filled with people with COVID-19 amid surging cases in Spain and large swaths of Europe, while in Canada, the country’s top doctor warned the country is at a “crossroads,” that the pandemic will surge back “faster and stronger” if people don’t minimize contacts with other human beings.
According to the latest federal modelling update, the epidemic growth outside Atlantic Canada is accelerating and while deaths remain low, hospitals are starting to show signs of increasing numbers. The reproductive number — the average number of people infected by each case — is around 1.4 nationally, meaning every 100 cases are passing the virus onto 140 new people.
In order for the epidemic to die out, the reproductive number needs to remain consistently below one, and Dr. Theresa Tam warned the situation will escalate — “we don’t want it to go up a giant ski hill” — if people don’t reduce their contacts.
“There is definitely evidence of increased risk-taking and growing infection rates in many countries,” said Jay Van Bavel, a social neuroscience professor at New York University. “It’s hard to tell if that is from the pandemic fatigue of citizens or the relaxation of certain policies,” Van Bavel says. But it’s not clear whether the one-million deaths mark will change behaviours or “move people in the way that it should.”
“Although the number is fodder for disturbing mental images, what’s unknown is how it will affect people’s collective and individual psyches,” Sarah Elizabeth Richards writes in National Geographic. “Is 200,000 deaths an important threshold that kicks us in the gut and creates a new level of urgency and outrage? Or will it lead to numbness and disengagement?”
Van Bavel, who grew up in Fox Creek, northern Alberta, isn’t sure the one-million mark will have a psychological impact.
“Stalin famously said that the death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic,” he said. “Research suggests that people are more moved by a single identifiable victim rather than a large number of faceless victims.”
Tam on Tuesday urged Canadians, particularly younger ones driving the surge, to “stay the course,” no matter how weary they feel, and experts worry that a certain numbness has set in amid the messaging, the daily case counts, the ticking off of the latest number of people tested and infected.
“Both citizens and policymakers are trying to make sense of the magnitude of the crisis and the lives that it threatens,” Joshua R. Goldstein and Ronald D. Lee write in the journal PNAS, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. “Our view is that COVID-19 should be seen as an extremely large mortality threat.”
In their paper the University of California, Berkeley authors explore what one million hypothetical American deaths due to COVID-19 would mean for life expectancy and remaining life years. According to their estimates, life expectancy for 2020 would drop by about three years, while 250,000 deaths would reduce lifespans by about a year.
While not nearly a monster on the scale of the Spanish flu, “COVID-19 mortality could in a matter of months be equal in overall magnitude to the decades-long HIV and opioid epidemics,” they said.
The latest forecast from a University of Washington research institute is projecting a deadly December, with up to 30,000 deaths a day, globally.
But here is where “psychic numbing,” as University of Oregon psychologist Paul Slovic has described it, comes into play. One person in distress will shock us, Slovic said. “Once you get into the hundreds or thousands or millions, these are just numbers,” Slovic said. What resonate are stories about individual lives touched by the pandemic.
Yet the incidence of COVID-19 is still low. In Canada, studies suggest as few as 0.7 per cent of adults have been exposed to the virus. “Most of the time you don't know many people who have been ill, if any. You look around — everything looks fine, people seem healthy,” Slovic said.
The grim milestones, the prominent numbers, briefly catch our attention, “but they're not going to change our behaviour,” Slovic said. “We're not suddenly going to say, oh, it's 200,000 (deaths) now, I'm really going to have to do something.”
“Lacking therapies or vaccines, it boils down to distancing and masks and sometimes lockdowns — that's what's needed,” Slovic said.