One death is a tragedy

Most people have undoubtedly heard the famous quote attributed to Josef Stalin that one death is a tragedy and a million deaths are a statistic. As our country passes 100,000 reported deaths due to COVID-19 (the actual number is undoubtedly higher), we're seeing a horrible demonstration of how true that is. Yet while the saying undoubtedly goes to something universal in human nature, it also seems to me that we in America are collectively more apt to shrug off mass death than are people in many other countries.

Here in my home state of Ohio plans are continuing to go forward to reopen more and more parts of the economy. I am bewildered and dismayed by this. We instituted social distancing early enough here to prevent a massive surge of cases and we saved thousands of lives by doing this. But if we look at the daily death numbers (shown here with daily reported numbers in gray and a moving average to smooth out the daily reporting variability in black), we see...

The numbers reached a peak about a month ago. And they have essentially just remained at that peak ever since. On average a hair over 40 deaths each day. No real sign that that's changing.

So with the plan to continue reopening more and more of society despite no decline in deaths, it seems that we, for the time being, have just kind of... given up(?) on trying to bring those numbers down, and are just kind of... hoping(?) that they don't go up more?

If 40 people were to die every day over the course of a year, that would be 14,600 deaths. These are the top causes of death in Ohio for the year 2017, from the CDC:

Therefore COVID-19 would be the number three cause of death for the year, easily outpacing the current third place "accidents."

(If anyone is thinking "but we don't shut down society for heart disease and cancer" - those aren't infectious diseases. Plus, heart disease and cancer are very complicated issues and every year enormous resources are put into trying to help people stricken with them. COVID-19 is not an easy problem but it's, in theory, much simpler to solve because we're starting to get a decent understanding of how it spreads and how we can contain its spread.)

Think about that. An entirely new cause of death, jumping all the way to third on the list. Potentially 14,000+ deaths over the course of a year in Ohio alone, most of those people whose lives would be saved if we succeeded in containing the disease the way that countries like South Korea and New Zealand have. At that rate of death, odds are most of us will either know someone directly or know someone who knows someone who will die of this thing.

It's true, of course, that we can't shut down society indefinitely. The shutdown was supposed to buy time to implement solutions that would let us safely reopen. The problem is that a lot of people, most importantly those in charge at the federal level, have no real interest in doing what needs to be done to implement those solutions.

And now as we continue reopening, the guidance from our state government seems to be getting less and less evidence-based. I was dismayed to see that live music is being allowed to restart as long as performers have six feet distancing from all other people. Since we know that some of the worst spreading events can happen from people singing, there's no way that six feet distance would provide remotely adequate safety in an indoor setting.

I was also dismayed by an email I got from a spin studio at which I once attended a class, where they are reopening in a few weeks, stating that they are amending their mask policy so that masks won't be required in the bike room during class, and they believe this change falls within the state's guidelines ("that customers should 'wear face coverings based on activity'"). True, a spin class is not an ideal time to wear a mask, but based on reports of disease spread from intense fitness classes, I think that a spin class during this pandemic is probably just not safe, period.

I'm not putting the blame there primarily on the spin studio's owners. The state is forcing people to choose between further economic hardship and safety during a pandemic. It doesn't have to be this way. The government could give everyone who needs it enough economic assistance to get through the pandemic until things actually are under control - which is far from where we are right now.

And if you're wondering where we're going to get the money? Once things are better, we tax the wealthy like we did to get us out of the Great Depression and through World War II - the previous biggest crises we faced in the last 100 years. Right now the wealthiest of Americans, rather than having to make even the tiniest of sacrifices themselves, want to force ordinary Americans, disproportionately people of color, to work in unsafe conditions and to risk sickness and death. We shouldn't let them get away with it.

I have written before about how sickened I am by the way we, as a society, shrug off roughly 40,000 annual deaths each (nationally) from gun violence and traffic violence, when the death rates from those same causes are so much lower in other wealthy nations. Now it looks like the same thing is happening with COVID-19, but at a vastly higher level.

The damage from this is going to be with us for a long time. We have to all do our parts to mitigate that damage as much as we can. Keep social distancing as much as reasonably possible, and always wear masks when in places with a risk of disease spread. And we have to hold the people who are most responsible for this catastrophe accountable. Most especially at the ballot box this fall. And then, in the years to come, we have to always remember what happened and take steps to fortify our social safety nets and our relevant government agencies to make sure something like this doesn't happen again.

One hundred thousands deaths, and counting, are a statistic. But to all the people affected by those deaths, every single one is its own tragedy.