https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/11/19/ranking-covid-deaths-american-history/
America is past 250,000 deaths caused by coronavirus. Pardon my French, but holy shit. 250,000 people. Families mourning. Mass graves. Distrusting the general public. Constant paranoia. Isolation. This is genuinely one of the most terrifying things I've witnessed in my mere 20 years of life thus far. My peers and I reflect near daily on the psychological affect that this pandemic has had on us both individually and as a society. Every time I see a commercial where the actors are in masks my heart hurts. It feels so dystopian. I saw a deal at Walmart yesterday for a shirt and matching mask combo. (Although I do hope the habit of wearing a mask in public when one is under the weather sticks well past this pandemic, taking some tips from Asian health practices.)
The article I've linked above compares the 250 thousand covid deaths to other events in United States history. One notable one is the comparison to 9/11. We lost less than 3,000 people that day. Tragic, of course. But we have put more emphasis and emotion in the last two decades into remembering those dead on September 11 than we have in the past eight months of losing 250,000. When the blame of deaths is a foreign threat, we were quick to scream and fight. But when the blame is on the state and actions against the interest of the public, we sit by idly. Of course, when we are all quarantined it's hard to create any mass movement, but that hasn't stopped the wave of activism that's arisen this year as well.
My point is that this is horrible. Terrifying. Insanely tragic. My mental health, along with everyone else's that I know, has plummeted thanks to both individual isolation and the constant knowledge disease wiping out around a thousand people a day.
Let's hope this vaccine works out in the near future...
This week:
Essay, Comment on time capsule glacier article thing, comment on "The president-elect is making the climate crisis a top priority"
It's terrible to think that we as a country mourn 9/11 so diligently but not the 250 thousand people who lost their lives to Covid. Some were even quicker to attack the Asian Americans in their community than to condemn the officials refusing to stop the spread of the disease. Since I'm only 22, I have no recollection of 9/11, being a barely sentient person. Generally, I feel our generation faces this strange disconnect when we see older generations talking about 9/11 since most of us have no memory or connection to the day. So seeing an entire country turn its back on a pandemic that affects every single person is frightening and frustrating. I hate that we even got to the point that a vaccine may be the only thing that saves us, when other countries have been able to nearly eradicate Covid simply through self- discipline and the wish to avoid hurting your neighbor.
ReplyDelete"being a barely sentient person"-- It's one thing to be barely sentient as a toddler, another as a "mature" adult. You're right, the cluelessness of so many Americans has made this health crisis so much more deadly than it had to be.
Delete"Let's hope this vaccine works out in the near future..."
ReplyDeleteIndeed. And let's hope we've all learned something about science and our shared responsibility to public health.
(And let's hope "hope" is not our only hope!)