| Imagine that a plane crashed in early March. Then another weeks later. Soon several drop from the sky every day. People shun nonessential air travel, which limits the toll. But two months into the catastrophe, more than a thousand still die daily, a jet crashing every few hours. How quickly would we rush back to the sky?
The analogy is imperfect to the current situation in the U.S. Covid-19 has halted not just air travel but much of commerce, education and public life. The costs of those shutdowns are real, visible and deeply felt. For those relatively untouched by the virus itself, the economic damage is far more immediate than the human cost.
It’s an instructive thought experiment, then, to visualize the lives lost to Covid-19. For many of us, these deaths are abstract: A line on a graph, a number in a headline.
Recorded deaths in the U.S. are near 60,000. Imagine 9/11’s death toll 20 times over, repeating on a loop, every day or two. About 7,000 Americans died in 19 years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq. The coronavirus killed more last week.
Still, we live with risk. About 38,000 Americans die in car crashes each year, but that keeps few of us off the roads. Driving carries a small but constant chance of death, a tolerable risk. As some states begin to open businesses, this is the calculation people must make: Whether the risk is tolerable.
We see few images of the dead, who often die alone. No pictures of burning wreckage, falling towers or scarred battlefields imprint the catastrophe on our minds. That so much of it is hidden doesn’t diminish the tragedy. But it may affect how we think about it.—John Tozzi |