New York Times headline: US Deaths Near 100,000, an Incalculable Loss

[lpetrich]

The New York Times on Twitter: "The front page of The New York Times for May 24, 2020 (image)" / Twitter

New York Times headline:

"US Deaths Near 100,000, an Incalculable Loss"
"They Were Not Simply Names on a List. They Were Us."

Nearly all of the May 24 print edition's front page is taken up with a list of some of the 1,000 known COVID-19 deaths that the NYT will list in that edition.

 

[repoman]

What is with the narrative driven sentimentality?

So, did they do that in 1957-8 or 1968-9 when the pandemics took over 100k lives with a smaller population?

 

[Elixir]

What is with the narrative driven sentimentality?

So, did they do that in 1957-8 or 1968-9 when the pandemics took over 100k lives with a smaller population?

Not in three months.
In the first instance, the total dead in the US for the 10-12 month run may be been in the six figure neighborhood by mid 1958.
In the second, the "Hong Kong Flu" came to the US in the fall of 1968 and took until 1970 to rack up near 100,000 US deaths. Improved medical care (vs the 50s) is credited with keeping those numbers down.
Now we have "better than ever" medical/epidemiological knowledge, treatment techniques, options and experience. And we are piling up bodies at an unprecedented rate.

Comparing what's happening here now to those events is pure and simple "Happy Talk".

You might be able (if/when we find out what actually happened) to construe that it "started" in the US back in late 2019 and so has been "running" for 6-8 months already, but the curve is still there, and 100,000+ people will have died in the US due to COVID-19 in March, April and May of this year alone.

We're still steaming along with some 2k/day new cases, and doing all we can to keep it going at that rate, hoping for Trump's miracle to keep it from going up to 5k cases a day. The final count (if there ever is one - this might have to become the new common cold) is going to be much much higher than the events of the 50s and 60s.

 

[Rhea]

It is an enormous weight on the world. So many people mourning.

 

[Elixir]

 

[bilby]

View attachment 27854

As far as I can tell, this isn't a quote from Pepys. It uses the word 'gadabouts' which came into common use some two centuries after Pepys's death, and a search of his diaries online (at https://www.pepysdiary.com/search/) doesn't find it. It's not really in his style or metre either.

There's a lot of Pepys parody out there, some more obviously modern than others.

Up betimes and by tube to Westminster, and there busy with several business all morning, for our firm intends a splendid show at the conference in the middle of this month. Then comes the intern to my office like a doting fool, and proves himself an ass talking excitedly of this plague come late out of China, which, he says, is now in Italy. Of which, my wife and I having had no Wi-Fi this last month, I know nothing, only to see how vexed this blockhead intern was did almost make me fearful myself. Yet I remembered talking with my Lord and Lady touching this matter, and him very skeptical, and my lady said to me, ‘What, Mr Pepys – shall’t die of a hiccough at the last?’ And at this jest we were all very merry. Thence home to sing with my wife in the garden, but with much trouble, for it was bitterly cold. And so to bed, our iPhones left downstairs as is now our custom.

(source)

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

https://www.rawstory.com/2020/05/an...mp-failed-to-protect-us-from-the-coronavirus/

Anatomy of a man-made disaster: 320 ways Donald Trump failed to protect us from the coronavirus
...
As the United States gets ready to pass 100,000 deaths (nearly 3X any other developed country) and 1,700,000 infections (5X any other developed country), the depths of human misery unleashed by Trump’s mishandling of the pandemic become clearer by the day.
....

------

A long list of the dismantling of US agencies established to deal with pandemics. Grim reading. Trump made sure we could not respond quickly and effectively to the covid-19 epidemic. This was not "just on of those things that happened", it happened because of near total ignorance, incompetence and unwillingness to take guidance from experts.



....
In September of 2019, a “study by the Council of Economic Advisers ordered by the National Security Council predicted that a pandemic similar to the 1918 Spanish flu or the 2009 swine flu could lead to a half-million deaths and cost the economy as much as $3.8 trillion.”
That same month, the Trump administration ended PREDICT, a “pandemic early-warning program aimed at training scientists in China and other countries to detect and respond to such a threat.” The program “gathered specimens from more than 10,000 bats and 2,000 other mammals in search of dangerous viruses. They detected about 1,200 viruses that could spread from wild animals to humans, signaling pandemic potential. More than 160 of them were novel coronaviruses, much like SARS-CoV-2.” (see #133)

....

And on and on in this vein.

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