US passes 700G dead from virus

State totals more than 18,600

WaPo to Boston: Drop dead?

Well, that paraphrase of the New York Daily News’ tabloid classic — “Ford to City: Drop Dead” as the feds declined to bail out the Big Apple in the 1970s — might be a bit of an overstatement, but The Washington Post did run an odd headline musing about the Hub’s demise: “The pandemic death toll is now the equivalent of all of Boston dropping dead.”

Political columnist Philip Bump’s Friday piece largely isn’t actually about Boston, but he does spend a couple more sentences ruminating on Hub residents’ deaths than one might expect in a non-Massachusetts coronavirus analysis.

“The scale of the pandemic is now the equivalent of the entire population of Boston dying over the course of 20 months,” Bump wrote. “At an average pace of 50 people per hour since Trump’s first news conference in February 2020 — just shy of one per minute — every single person in Boston would be collapsing to the ground.”

On a serious note, the comparison does technically hold water. The U.S. just passed 700,000 dead from the virus nationwide, per the Johns Hopkins coronavirus tracker — a number that includes, based on both “confirmed” and “probable” cases, more than 18,600 Bay Staters and 1,400 Bostonians, per local and state data.

Per the 2020 Census, Boston has a population of 684,012.

The most recent sevenday average of deaths in this state is about 13. Though that’s orders of magnitude below the daily numbers from the first peak of the pandemic — and still well below the second peak from this past winter — deaths in Massachusetts remain a reality, as they do across the country.