My dad is among the 341,000 gone

he hardest part of returning to work as a journalist in April, after my father died of COVID, was the headlines. That month, when New York was the epicenter of the world’s coronavirus outbreak, numbers dominated: the number infected, hospitalized, intubated, dead.

My father, George Varghese, died early on the morning of April 13, one of 778 people lost to the virus in New York that day, anonymously included in one of those headlines.

There were other relevant numbers: He was 74, like the president, in the age group most at risk. It had already become clear that many patients like him appeared to improve but worsened suddenly after seven to 10 days. He was placed on a ventilator after eight days in the hospital. He died within hours of intubation.

We’re still being inundated with numbers even as politicians celebrate the advent of a vaccine, the first approved dose of which was administered at the hospital where my father died. More than 19 million confirmed infections nationwide accumulating at a pace of more than 200,000 a day. The number of Americans dead now totals 341,000 — a toll that’s growing by more than 2,000 a day. Records are made one day, broken the next.

Officials use these numbers to justify all kinds of action or inaction. But it’s clear that some of them, and much of the public, don’t really understand what they represent. Like many others standing in COVID’s wake, I do.

For me, the numbers elicit, if I let them, scenes and emotions so visceral they may as well be tangible.

I hear myself explain to my mother, who was visiting me in California when the shutdowns began, that her husband was afflicted and alone at Long Island Jewish Medical Center.

I feel the frustration of trying to reach harried hospital staff every few hours, after every shift change and in between what I calculated were meal breaks.

I see my mother, holed up with me in my tiny bathroom to take the late-night call in which a doctor asked whether they should resuscitate my dad after the next Code Blue. She looks at me and says, “What should I do?”

I hear the denial of my mom’s wish of just a photo of his face because after dying, COVID victims are wrapped in plastic. And I see it — I see the body sheathed in layers and layers of plastic, not out of respect as for an ancient mummy, but out of fear.

I see dirt being thrown on the coffin as we watch the funeral in Great Neck from across the country by a video link, thinking, oh, my God, this is really happening, he’s really gone, this is really it.

There have been many attempts to imbue the numbers with meaning over the course of this arduous year. In May, when the national death toll hit 100,000, the New York Times put the names of 1,000 COVID victims on its front page. But as I witnessed in real time on Twitter, many people didn’t understand that the list was just a tiny fraction of the toll. I scanned the online package to find the obituary I wrote for my father, but he was one of the thousands left out.

As spring turned into summer and fall, infection and death rates dropped. I saw the smaller numbers celebrated as if they didn’t mean that someone died: A boy would never again have his grandpa slice a watermelon for him, a wife would never again have her husband organize her medications in their opaque system, a daughter would never again receive a joyously garish birthday card from her father. I wondered whether the assumption was that even though the disease stalks all ages, the lives that ended in their 70s and 80s somehow mattered less.

Now, as experts predicted, infection rates and deaths are rising again. But this time, it’s not just that many fail to understand the significance of the numbers. It’s that many don’t want to understand them, don’t even want to see them, as if the inconveniences and hardships of the pandemic and shutdowns are worse than the lives lost.

Which is not to minimize those inconveniences and hardships. They have shuttered or endangered small businesses that are mainstays of their communities, taken away the livelihoods of people struggling to find their next meal or pay the latest urgent bill, and forced parents to choose between work and caring for children who are deprived of social connections they took for granted.

As the death toll mounts, perhaps the statistics will finally change behavior and slow the sharp surge even as the vaccine brings hope. But the numbers will ultimately fail to capture the loss.