Via the Columbia Journalism Review: Have we normalized the COVID-19 death toll? Excerpt:
In early May, Charlie Warzel, a columnist at the New York Times, saw a tweet that hit him “like a ton of bricks.” In the tweet, Eric Nelson, who works in book publishing, imagined a future in which Americans simply get used to the death toll from COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus. Warzel wondered if we might be there already.
“The day I read Mr. Nelson’s tweet, 1,723 Americans were reported to have died from the virus,” he wrote. “And yet their collective passing was hardly mourned. After all, how to distinguish those souls from the 2,097 who perished the day before or the 1,558 who died the day after?”
He went on to compare the possible normalization of COVID deaths to the normalization of deaths caused by gun violence.
In late May, as America approached 100,000 total recorded COVID deaths, the Times, where editors had been reflecting on how best to mark the milestone, published a striking Sunday front page. Under the headline, “US Deaths Near 100,000, An Incalculable Loss,” the Times ran a list, spanning the length and breadth of A1, naming COVID victims in the US, each with a mini obituary. (“Muriel M. Going, 92, Cedarburg, Wis., taught her girls sheepshead and canasta”; “Eugene Lamar Limbrick, 41, Colorado Springs, loved automobiles, especially trucks.”) Simone Landon, an editor on the paper’s graphics desk, said the idea was to demonstrate the humanity behind the grim numbers, amid what Landon and her colleagues sensed was “a little bit of fatigue” with COVID data, “both among ourselves and perhaps in the general reading public.”
As that week progressed, other outlets followed suit. On Wednesday, May 27—the day the official milestone was predicted to be hit, and was—the front page of USA Today showed the faces of 100 COVID victims, next to a graphic demonstrating scale. As soon as the 100,000 number was confirmed, it was splashed atop news websites and announced on cable news. “Very sad breaking news we can report right now,” Wolf Blitzer said on CNN. “Very, very sad.” The following day, the front page of The Washington Post portrayed victims as beams of light, shooting up from a map of the US. The cover of The Economist turned the 100,000 figure into a literal milestone, casting a shadow across an empty road. Its headline: “The American way.”
According to several news organizations and Johns Hopkins University, America passed 110,000 confirmed COVID deaths in the past few days; in other words, more than 10,000 people—10,000 beams of light, 100 times the faces on a USA Today cover, one-tenth of an Economist milestone—died in the 10 or so days since the 100,000 marker was hit. There’s been some coverage of the rising death count since late May, but nothing of the depth and breadth that we saw back then. The difference is complicated to assess (more on which below)—but it’s hard to avoid feeling like it exposed the arbitrariness of using round numbers as news pegs for human life.
Quantifying loss of life is always fraught; with COVID-19, the methodological discrepancies in how we count cases and deaths add an extra layer of arbitrariness. (A recent analysis by the Post and the Yale School of Public Health concluded that overall deaths linked to the pandemic likely surpassed 100,000 three weeks before the official count—and headlines—caught up.)
As the toll continues to climb, it seems likely that the gaps between the numbers we consider round enough to note will grow ever larger. Yesterday—the day I returned to Mr. Warzel’s old column—498 Americans were reported to have died. To borrow his words, “their collective passing was hardly mourned.”
There’s a lot to parse here. The packages marking the 100,000 milestone were powerful journalism, and many of them reckoned with the nuances outlined above. (For instance, the Post, even prior to its analysis with Yale, noted that the true death count was likely higher; the Times acknowledged that a number “can never convey the individual arcs of life, the 100,000 ways of greeting the morning and saying good night.”)
The pandemic as a whole is still a big news story, including on cable. Yesterday, for example, we heard about New York’s reopening, Trump’s imminent plan to start holding rallies again, and the World Health Organization’s warning that, on Sunday, the daily rate of new confirmed cases hit a high, suggesting that globally, the pandemic is getting worse.
Still, too often, the COVID coverage we’re now seeing feels tired, as if it’s going through the motions. That’s understandable. After years of whiplash news and months of this particular cycle, journalists are exhausted—not to mention furloughed, underpaid, unemployed, arrested, assaulted, and so on. The pandemic story has been especially demanding to cover—for logistical, scientific, and emotional reasons—and also to consume. Fatigue isn’t limited to the press; as Robinson Meyer and Alexis C. Madrigal wrote for The Atlantic on Sunday, America as a whole “slowly seems to be giving up” on the battle against the pandemic. But we have to fight such feelings. The stakes are too high not to.
