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By David Wallace-Wells
Opinion Writer
Twenty months ago, in July 2022, I wrote a long essay describing what I call the “pretty brutal” end-of-life long-term: probably around 100,000 deaths per year, at least for the next few years. This figure is only a rough estimate, drawn from epidemiologist Trevor Bedford’s model. But it turns out that was almost completely true. The official tally indicates that about 170,000 Americans died of Covid in those 20 months, a rate that suggests that by the end of the year, the total may have topped 200,000.
Two hundred thousand deaths are still “pretty brutal” and one of the many things the pandemic has taught us time and time again is our ability to normalize ourselves. But the burden of Covid is also easing and the shadow of the first-year emergency is fading. In retrospect, I marvel not only at the many narratives that we are still wrong, but also at the number of probably contradictory stories that can be justified through the facts.
This phenomenon can be seen more clearly if you investigate what at the beginning of the pandemic was his most motivating and perhaps most exciting question: how many more people did he kill and where?We used this knowledge to make arguments about mitigation policies, but it was also a more basic type of information, around which anxiety and attitude can be calibrated.
In 2020, we assessed this figure rather crudely, employing the crude number of deaths, which invariably made the U. S. look like the world’s biggest pandemic failure. This gave rise to one of the dominant ethical stories of the early years of the pandemic: that countries that deserved to have waited to do maximum production actually ended up in the worst situations, and that the United States under Donald Trump was the world’s most striking example of pandemic mismanagement.
From time to time, we would adjust those figures based on the length of the population, which would result in the country appearing to be doing a little worse than most rich countries considered its American peers, in line with capita measures. Thanks to this move, Britain has become the textbook example of the failure of the world’s rich: Plague Island, as the British press calls it.
But those statistics, while attesting to the scale of suffering and tragedies in countries, were also skewed in two vital tactics when it came to comparisons with abroad. First, they depended on the number of Covid tests conducted: countries with higher Covid surveillance tended to record more official Covid deaths, and less competitive places recorded far fewer Covid deaths. Second, the number of deaths was decided in part through the age distribution of a country’s population, as Covid was much more fatal for older people. and especially the very old than the young and middle-aged. (In an immunologically naïve population dealing with early pandemic strains, the nonagenarians’ infection death rate was perhaps a thousand times higher than that of their grandchildren. )
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