THENEWYORKER,APRIL11, 2022 11
COMMENT
ONEINAMILLION
“
I
f I look at the mass, I will never
act,” Mother Teresa once said. “If I
look at the one, I will.” During the pan-
demic, we’ve all grappled with this dy-
namic. Our country is on the cusp of a
grim milestone: soon, a million people
in the United States will have died of
covid-19. Yet for many Americans this
reality seems vague, abstract—a group
problem for which we must take indi-
vidual responsibility. We struggle to see
the crisis we’re in.
Part of the problem is fatigue. An-
other is that the coronavirus has exacted
its toll unevenly. covid is relatively un-
threatening to younger people, but has
killed one in seventy-five older Ameri-
cans; residents of long-term-care facili-
ties make up less than three per cent of
the population, but have accounted for
about one in five covid deaths. The
death rate for Blacks and Hispanics has
been twice that for whites. And, owing
to divergent immunization rates, people
in the reddest counties have been dying
at more than three times the rate of those
in the bluest. For some of us, the pan-
demic may feel over, but more Ameri-
cans died of covid in 2021 than in 2020.
So far in 2022, the virus has taken an-
other hundred and thirty thousand lives.
It can be hard to grasp the meaning
of such numbers. We might come to
terms with them by noting that U.S. life
expectancy has now fallen by nearly two
years—the sharpest single-year decline
since the Second World War. We might
count lost time, years forgone with fam-
ily, friends, and colleagues. An eighty-
year-old who died during the pandemic
lost an average of almost eight years of
life; a forty-year-old lost nearly four de-
cades. This means that a million deaths
will have expunged tens of millions of
years of life—a mass erasure of new,
strange, and wonderful possibilities.
One of the most prevalent false be-
liefs about the pandemic is that the gov-
ernment has exaggerated the number
of deaths; in fact, the official count is
an underestimate. Since the pandemic
began, at least a hundred thousand more
people have died in this country than
would have during normal times. Many
of these “excess deaths” are uncounted
covid fatalities. Others are the result
of missed care for conditions such as
heart attacks and strokes. Drug over-
doses have risen to record levels; skipped
cancer screenings and childhood vacci-
nations will add to the virus’s collateral
damage in the years to come. The truth
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA
THE TALK OF THE TOWN
is that America’s battle with covid-
has been more damaging than we like
to think. And it is still ongoing.
In parts of the country, cases are ris-
ing again. Reopening plays a role. So
does B.A.2, a subvariant of Omicron
that is now dominant in the U.S. and
around the world, and is thought to be
thirty to fifty per cent more contagious
than B.A.1, the version that swept across
the U.S. this winter. B.A.2 doesn’t ap-
pear to be more lethal, and vaccines re-
main effective at averting the most se-
rious consequences of infection; still, it
promises to cause breakthrough infec-
tions, and presents a serious threat to
the elderly, the immunocompromised,
and the unvaccinated. Last month, B.A.
nearly tripled coronavirus cases in the
U.K.; at one point, one in thirty older
Britons was thought to be infected.
covid hospitalizations and deaths rose,
though not as dramatically—preëxist-
ing immunity softened the blow.
It’s not clear exactly how America’s
B.A.2 story will unfold. Our vaccination
rates are lower than those of many Eu-
ropean nations: just two-thirds of Amer-
icans are fully vaccinated, and although
the F.D.A. has now approved a second
booster for people over fifty, just sixty
per cent of them have received their first.
Meanwhile, many states have done away
with most pandemic restrictions, and
people are increasingly returning to their
pre-pandemic routines. Still, because
immunity against B.A.1 appears to pro-
tect against B.A.2, the U.S. may escape
the worst consequences: according to
one estimate, nearly four in five Amer-
icans have some Omicron immunity.
In 2020, when the virus arrived, the
