There's a city full of the dead, and we've barely noticed

There have been 70,477 deaths from Covid-19 so far, and yet this somehow has barely entered our public consciousness.

Think about that a moment, because this isn't sinking in. Seventy thousand lives lost so far. Seventy thousand mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, grandparents and children.

The federal government estimates that by June the death toll may hit 3,000 people daily.

When I was a newspaper editor we'd have focused on the human angle to bring it home. Someone local died of covid? Give me a news story. Talk to family, create a legacy to the life cut short. Show our readers what this is doing to their community. This is history unfolding, and it's our job to chronicle it as it happens in real time, to leave a record for future generations.

Our news media have been so ravaged by layoffs the past 20 years, though, they can't really do it justice, so we're stuck with anodyne numbers and the antics of our Oompa Loompa in chief as he talks about getting light inside people's bodies and injecting them with disinfectant

70,477 in a two months is a lot. That's more than died in the Vietnam War, when the nation was moved to grief by the daily news broadcasts of soldiers' bodies coming home..We're not seeing the bodies this time, though. Instead we're seeing job openings at Walmart and we're seeing that Wendy's is out of fresh beef, and we're not making the connection

I live in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Our population is 56,100.

All dead.

Next door Highland Park has a population of 14,000

All dead too.

That's how serious this disease is. In the past four or five weeks, it has killed enough people to empty my city and the borough next door. Walk down George Street, stroll through our three university campuses and visit every school. It's a ghost town, because everyone is dead. Go across the Albany Street Bridge and it's the same story all over.

Three thousand deaths a day means that in another month, this devastation will repeat itself every three weeks.

If a mid-size city or two just died every two or three weeks, don't you think we might be more worried about stopping it then how soon we could get a haircut or go out to eat again? If the disease hit like that we would sit up. We would take notice. We would grieve. We wouldn't be talking about the economy, and we sure wouldn't want to listen to Trump insulting his critics and complaining about how unappreciated he is.

We would mourn the dead, and we would demand better support for our hospitals and medical workers. We would demand, better pay for people who show up at work and running the risk of dying to keep our nation's food supply lines running.

If an entire city died every three weeks, gasping for breath we would want it to stop. We would demand some common decency from people claiming that the loss of 70,000 people is no big deal.

That's what is happening, and as a nation that's not our reaction.

We. Must. Do. Better.

Please.

For all our sakes.


Copyright © 2020 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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