The Washington Post - USA (2022-05-15)

A30 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, MAY 15 , 2022

opinion

One million of us

he pandemic’s death toll in the

United States will soon reach

1 million people, according to data

collected by The Washington Post.

Conveying the meaning or the

magnitude of this number is impossible. But

1 million deaths is the benchmark of an

unprecedented American tragedy.

Consider this comparison: The

population of D.C. is about 670,000 people.

Try to imagine life without every person, in

every building, on every street, in the

nation’s capital. And then another 330,000

people.

To attempt to put the 1 million deaths in

context, we plotted its damage over more

than two years and compared the continuing

death toll to previous catastrophes in our

past. The bottom line is staggering: Covid

killed hundreds of thousands more people

than the Civil War, one of the deadliest

events in American history.

As we pass this grim milestone, it’s

important to pause and consider what we’ve

been through. And to remind ourselves that

behind each number was a person — and

that each of these people was someone’s

friend, someone’s love, someone’s family.

by Sergio Peçanha and Yan Wu

T

There are 10,000 figures on this page, each representing

someone killed by covid in the United States.

It would take 100 such pages to show the full toll.