Now America has passed 500,000 deaths, what next?
social issue
IN A SENSE 500,000 is just a very big number. It is not even accurate, given that perhaps 100,000 American deaths from covid-19 were never counted. And yet every one of them was someone: grandpas and great aunts, old friends and new, neighbours and workmates. Many of them died alone. Grief was President Joe Biden’s theme at the White House on February 22nd, as he remembered 500,071 Americans lost to the pandemic. Warning his compatriots against seeing “each life as a statistic or a blur”, he said that there was “nothing ordinary about them”. At five o’clockthe Stars and Stripes was lowered to half-mast for five days while 500 votive candles flickered on the steps of the South Portico. In just over a year the pandemic has killed Americans on the scale of a world war or a decades-long catastrophe, like the opioid crisis (see chart). In absolute terms no country begins to compare—Brazil, which comes next, has yet to log its 250,000th death. In relative terms America has recorded 151 deaths per 100,000, fewer than Belgium, Britain, Italy and Portugal, but among the most severe.
The Economist
Feb 25, 2021