I made my first COVID-19 graph on July 8th, before I knew Nanny would contract COVID-19, before I knew it would rob us of our goodbyes, and before I knew it would kill her.
I thought I was making that first graph to protect someone else’s grandma somewhere. I didn’t imagine it would be my own. And it didn’t protect her. It didn’t protect a lot of grandmas. We like to think we can make a difference in our community, especially amongst our friends and family. But our pleas often fall on deaf ears.
Mine did.
That was only weeks ago. Now, Nanny is gone. We cremated her. 7 of us were permitted to gather at the cemetery. And I am making a new graph. It hasn’t yet been two months, and I am adding 50,000 new people to my graph. 50,000 new deaths. 50,000 more Nans.
I see you. I see you, both young and healthy or old and willful, going out in numbers saying you will not live in fear. I try to be glad you are not afraid. I try not to bite when I see food service worker friends go to bars unmasked on Instagram. When I see healthcare providers, who take care of the elderly on weekdays, but who go out to packed clubs on weekends. I see you.
I hope you never become afraid. I hope your Nans emerge unscathed from this mess of a year. But it will not be in your own doing. It will be in the mercy of others.
And many of us received no such mercy.
Graph is my own, data provided by The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, The National Institute on Aging, The Kaiser Family Foundation, The U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse, The Florida Department of Health, cross-referenced with many more.
Rant over. As for facts—
First and foremost, COVID-19 is now the third leading cause of death in the United States, coming only after cancer and heart disease’s annual death counts. Mind you, it has not yet been 6 months (of 12 months in a year) when it comes to COVID-19 deaths in the US, and it has already reached #3.
I see misinformation spreading about the seriousness of COVID-19 again, ahead of Labor Day when we will be tempted to go out in numbers. I see too the misinformation that there have been not nearly as many deaths due to COVID as previously thought. That only 6% are truly from COVID. Wouldn’t it be great if it were true? It isn’t. Do not spread this misleading nightmare dressed up like a dream. Do not use this as an excuse to go out. To feign ignorance. To jump on our first false hope, tempting as it may be. We must look farther than social media for our information.
Instead of getting nitty-gritty about what this data ACTUALLY means, I’ll make it simple. Already, there have been 200,000+ excess deaths in the last year than in the year before, though our population has not proportionally grown. In fact, it is smaller. What could account for such a huge leap? That’s pretty close to the number of deaths in the graph (left) isn’t it? If you’re going to be a conspiracy theorist, please consider this.
Many seem to think that “previous conditions” discredit whether a person died of COVID (and by 94%) but let me give you my family’s example: Nan had serious Alzheimer’s. It made it very hard to get her the care she needed during COVID. She was weak. She was in the most risk-prone environment. She did not understand why she needed to wear a mask in close quarters. She could not be calmed or reasoned with when it got bad. She could not receive the same treatments. In these 6 ways, did Nanny’s Alzheimers contribute to how she ultimately died? Of course. But so did, say, geography. The more important question is: Would Nanny still be alive if someone that COULD be more careful WAS more careful for her, and she hadn’t contracted COVID in the first place? ABSOLUTELY. It was COVID that filled her lungs. COVID that depleted her brain of oxygen.
Let there be no doubt that it was COVID that killed her.
We must stop proclaiming that previous conditions are what cause people’s death—ignoring that they would still be alive if COVID had no part in it. As if it gives us an excuse to continue our recklessness because “they were going to die anyway.” We’re all going to die anyway. Some of us sooner than others. COVID can make a livable condition a sudden death sentence. A full life can be condensed down to a matter of days due to COVID-19.
Graphic from Science Alert, article here
If you contracted COVID-19, and it was “not so bad,” I thank your god for it. I’m so grateful you are still with us. But that doesn’t muddle the fact that people are dying due to the careless spread of COVID-19. Your experience with something does not make it less lethal to someone else. My experience wouldn’t either. For example, in 2018 my car was totaled, and my shattered pelvis healed on its own. I was so lucky. But I would never claim that accidents are less horrible and deadly because of my personal experience. I would not start drifting around corners to prove more people might be lucky too. So do not detract from the fatal wickedness of COVID-19.
Listen, I understand. You say you are not afraid. But fear is one of our most primal impulses that kept humans alive throughout our vast history when faced with danger. So maybe consider having at least some respect for that fear, for it is not fear that is killing us. If anything, it is our selfishness, our disrespect for modern science, and our blatant disregard for human life that killed our most vulnerable citizens.
They will write it that way in our history books.
The July 8th blog I reference and associated graph can be found here: clairesalmonbooks.com/blog/a-graph-of-us-deaths-in-numbers There is more data in that blog post. This one is much more emotional. I figured if someone wasn’t swayed by data, maybe my emotion might touch them.