"They Were Not Simply Names on a List. They Were Us."
May 23, 2020 6:29 PM   Subscribe

On May 24, 2020, the New York Times' front page will contain only one article, a list of 1000 names of Americans who have died from COVID-19 [tweeted image of front page], distilled from the nearly 100,000 deaths in the United States attributed to the virus this Memorial Day weekend.

Each person is described with a brief passage that captures something of who each was.

The Project Behind a Front Page Full of NamesNew York Times; John Grippe; May 23, 2020 • 'A presentation of obituaries and death notices from newspapers around the country tries to frame incalculable loss.'
Departments across The Times have been robustly covering the coronavirus pandemic for months. But [Simone Landon, assistant editor of the Graphics desk] and her colleagues realized that “both among ourselves and perhaps in the general reading public, there’s a little bit of a fatigue with the data.”

Putting 100,000 dots or stick figures on a page “doesn’t really tell you very much about who these people were, the lives that they lived, what it means for us as a country,” Ms. Landon said. So, she came up with the idea of compiling obituaries and death notices of Covid-19 victims from newspapers large and small across the country, and culling vivid passages from them.
posted by ZeusHumms (66 comments total) 30 users marked this as a favorite
 
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posted by PhineasGage at 6:40 PM on May 23, 2020 [1 favorite]


On The Media had some pretty extensive coverage this weekend about the need for every person to have an obituary. The numbers are so overwhelming and the cost is often greater than people can afford even in good times let alone in the midst of all this. It was heartbreaking and empathy-building to listen to. I wish I could link the individual segment but here's the full episode. (no transcript apparent at this time)
posted by hippybear at 6:43 PM on May 23, 2020 [15 favorites]


Six deaths in and we have a murder victim... I really wish the NYT had expended a bit more effort fact checking such a high-profile front page.
posted by a box and a stick and a string and a bear at 6:45 PM on May 23, 2020 [12 favorites]


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posted by Silverstone at 6:55 PM on May 23, 2020


Mod note: A couple deleted; not the best thread for derails, even well-intentioned ones.
posted by Eyebrows McGee (staff) at 7:12 PM on May 23, 2020 [2 favorites]


I'd just like to drop Uncle Bucky's obit here, because he deserves for more people to know about the old rascal.
posted by SecretAgentSockpuppet at 7:18 PM on May 23, 2020 [23 favorites]


Given that one of the side-effects of the medical system being overwhelmed is that services normally available are tied up in case after case of COVID. Add in the undercounting, and I strongly suspect we passed this macabre milestone a while ago.

And evidently people are bored so they're fine with it. Inconceivable.
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 7:25 PM on May 23, 2020 [17 favorites]


The Guardian is documenting the lives of every US medical worker who dies helping patients during the pandemic in the Lost on the frontline project. These are some of the first tragic cases.

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posted by katra at 7:35 PM on May 23, 2020 [19 favorites]


Can someone please clarify this murder business? I can't get access to see the list.
posted by tzikeh at 7:35 PM on May 23, 2020 [4 favorites]


Name #6 is Jordan Driver Haynes, who apparently died by homicide a couple weeks ago. His obituary includes "Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, private family services will be held" which makes me think they just searched for "COVID-19" in obits.
posted by Flannery Culp at 7:43 PM on May 23, 2020 [11 favorites]




Mod note: foop, this is really, really the wrong thread for jokes.
posted by Eyebrows McGee (staff) at 7:57 PM on May 23, 2020 [10 favorites]


Can someone please clarify this murder business?
Sure. The NYT acknowledged this entry was in error, pulled it from later editions, and is issuing a correction. The COVID deniers are leveraging the error to discount every death on the list and bots are having a heyday.

Let's move on and not mention it again, please.
posted by prinado at 9:09 PM on May 23, 2020 [61 favorites]


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posted by moonbird at 9:13 PM on May 23, 2020


There is no reason for people to die. No fucking reason. Vietnam got out with 0 deaths. New Zealand got out with 20. Even extrapolated to the population of the US that would be the equivalent of 150 people dying.

Why do they have to die? Because this is America god dammit. This is a place where we worship positive liberty. We worship it to the point where 100,000 of our fellow citizens (so far) have to die unnecessarily in order to prove to ourselves that we have it. We will sacrifice 100,000 of our fellow citizens (so far) out of sheer spite. We will sacrifice 100,000 of or fellow citizens (so far) in order to make sure our leisure activities are not impeded should we wish to engage in the folly of undertaking them.

For a lot of people this period of human history will be one of the hardest periods of their lives. 100,000 of our fellow citizens (so far) have had theirs cut short. We didn't want to sacrifice anything, we weren't willing to endure, and a plurality of us are willing to live in a state of delusion rather than face up to the worst reality we've ever had to face. Not only that, we learn nothing. We go back to our same battles. Everything is a god damned shibboleth to signal to people. You can't be in favor of things because they work, you're just a fucking liberal trying to engage in some grand conspiracy to take advantage of a situation.

I'm not particularly religious. I'm pretty much a lapsed Anglican who turned into a weak agnostic. I've read the bible, I get the gist of it, but I can't abide by a lot of it. I never really went into the religious side of things because as I read more into it I kind of disengaged. Who the hell in their right mind wants to kill a woman just because she had sex outside of marriage? Nevertheless, I do spend my days hoping that if there is some sort of supreme power, that they're taking fucking notes because Romans 12:19 is starting to wear really thin.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 9:18 PM on May 23, 2020 [55 favorites]


Grappling With a Terrible Milestone: One Hundred Thousand Dead • The Atlantic; Meghan O'Rourke; May 23, 2020 • 'To mourn in a moment of collective trauma is to experience not one but multiple layers of loss.'
What we do know, or ought to know: Mourning together is at least as important—more important?—to our survival as the divisive arguments about whether restoring the economy or protecting vulnerable people matters more. In this election year, every aspect of the pandemic and the nation’s response to it has been politicized, and there is no collective, top-down mourning process—an absence that is exposing the unseemly seams of our barely stitched-together society. Right now, our mourning feels individual, not collective, with fights breaking out about masks, freedom, “fake news,” and the like.
posted by ZeusHumms at 9:46 PM on May 23, 2020 [5 favorites]


I personally know four people who have died from covid, I know of 10+ from friends who have lost friends or family. None have had funerals, or wakes, or celebrations, and it’s heartbreaking. I haven’t been able to get lupus meds for 9 weeks, and despite avoiding humanity as much as possible, today I started running a fever. I don’t want to join the choir invisible, and I’m terrified of how many of us will. It hurts me to think of how many are dying alone, unremembered, unremarked. Lists like this should be on the front page of every newspaper, every day.
posted by SecretAgentSockpuppet at 10:33 PM on May 23, 2020 [89 favorites]


Why do they have to die? Because this is America god dammit.

I'm all for hand wringing about the American character as much as the next commie pinko, but this is not a failure of the American character as a whole. Most people are not reopen wackos. It is a failure of Trump's moron-gangster capitalism and a success of Russian bot propaganda. Imagine another recent President {even Bush Jr.) fucking it up this badly. Reagan seems like the closest comparator who killed a lot of his own citizens through malevolent negligence during a pandemic. I don't think even Reagan would have endangered his base by trying to create a wedge issue which would result in thousands of his supporters dying.
posted by benzenedream at 12:27 AM on May 24, 2020 [32 favorites]


With respect, I disagree. I don't think this is the time or place for a thorough argument, and I absolutely do agree with laying blame on Trump and the Republican-led government. But I think this is a failure of the American character, that we have so many dead, and while those of us who are mourning need time to mourn, as we contemplate this terrible mile marker and consider how we got here and what the future holds, I think we need to be honest with ourselves about the many ways our society is structured, both through collective political decisions and individual choices about how to behave and what to value, that led us to this point.
posted by biogeo at 1:17 AM on May 24, 2020 [28 favorites]


If the hundred thousand American victims were to be commemorated at an official service running twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, allotting no more than a minute for each victim – really just enough time for their name, a few biographical details, and a moment of silence – the repetition alone would take more than two months. Except by then there would be more names to recite, of course.
posted by Joe in Australia at 2:29 AM on May 24, 2020 [21 favorites]


There are two or three other threads for hashing out who is to blame for these deaths.

Let's please keep this one thread for mourning and talking about people like Lloyd, an actor I worked with some years back who was the cast class clown and who also ran a coffee shop and was such a welcoming presence people called him the "Mr. Hooper of Bed-Stuy".
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 3:45 AM on May 24, 2020 [36 favorites]


None have had funerals, or wakes, or celebrations, and it’s heartbreaking.

Back in April I made a comment in a previous thread about someone I knew, a noted writer and public intellectual, who had died of covid. In a normal time his death would have received a lot of attention, probably front page of some papers and definitely front page of the arts section in most. Instead, as far as I can tell, after more than a month he's gotten two alumni association writeups, one from his publisher, and one (extremely nicely done) traditional newspaper obituary. And that is for a person with some slight amount of public prominence; the vast majority of people who are dying are getting zero recognition and attention.

It is disgraceful. We are not just treating people as disposable but we are treating their deaths as invisible and unworthy of recognition. (You can also see this in how most reporting of the worldwide epidemic has gone, where the outbreaks and human toll outside of the US and a few countries in Europe isn't given the slightest amount of sustained attention.)
posted by Dip Flash at 5:57 AM on May 24, 2020 [19 favorites]


Is there an updated twitter link? It's broken.
posted by republican at 6:19 AM on May 24, 2020 [1 favorite]


I don't personally know anyone yet that has died from COVID, but at least 4 people in my twitter stream have reported having family members die from it. I think by the time this is over everyone is going to be at least one degree of separation away from someone who has died. The need for memorializing is gigantic. I don't know how we do this in the right way, truly.

I lost one of my best friends in my entire life to cancer late last year and we'd been planning a memorial service for this Spring. That's now gone. He's gone. All I have is my mourning in my own heart.

So many others are feeling exactly this way right now. It's heartbreaking.
posted by hippybear at 6:24 AM on May 24, 2020 [6 favorites]


Republican, new link here.
posted by computech_apolloniajames at 6:37 AM on May 24, 2020 [2 favorites]


Mod note: Deleted the 100,000 dots comment. I understand the intent, but it makes the whole thread fairly unusable for mobile users.
posted by taz (staff) at 6:44 AM on May 24, 2020 [22 favorites]


. x ∞
posted by WhyamIhereagain at 7:03 AM on May 24, 2020 [2 favorites]


The NYTimes has now posted a digital treatment of the list/article (which wasn't available yet last night).
posted by nobody at 7:11 AM on May 24, 2020 [8 favorites]


I'm crying both tears of grief and tears of rage. The number of the dead is almost impossible to hold in my head; the precise details shared of the lives lost are even harder to hold in my heart.
posted by mixedmetaphors at 7:15 AM on May 24, 2020 [6 favorites]


#notallAmericans didn't stop the US from invading Afghanistan and Iraq.

In the runup to the Iraq war polling was showing ~30% 'let's fuck 'em up yeehaw!', 30% 'this is going to be a mistake most likely' and a 30% mushy middle in either camp, depending on what they last saw on TV.

this is a nation of children, very easy to manipulate.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 7:23 AM on May 24, 2020 [12 favorites]


First I'll admit we're not flag-flyers here in our home, but I think it's remarkable that even the news of half or a quarter as many deaths never prompted anyone to order flags lowered to half staff anywhere in the country.

If this had happened on Obama's watch, I have a feeling that no one with a flagpole would have waited for his order.
posted by emelenjr at 7:26 AM on May 24, 2020 [13 favorites]


The NYT acknowledged this entry was in error ... Let's move on and not mention it again, please.

No, I think this is worth meditating on and not sweeping under the rug. I hadn't heard about it before, and I'm glad someone mentioned it.

The media, especially The New York Times, holds itself to be this hallowed institution of truth-telling, and a mistake like this makes it seem like the Times is more interested in scoring political points against Trump than getting to the facts.

It's the sixth name in the list and could have been caught with a modicum of care.

I'm not a COVID truther nor a Trump fan, but I think the left places way too much trust in the Times and we need to be reminded that it's run by people who can be self-serving. This is the hallowed institution that reported on WMDs in Iraq and led us into a disastrous $2 trillion war. This is why the other side distrusts the "MSM."
posted by Borborygmus at 7:41 AM on May 24, 2020 [5 favorites]


Mod note: Updated the twitter link in the post to NYT's corrected tweet after they deleted the original.
posted by cortex (staff) at 7:55 AM on May 24, 2020 [1 favorite]


Every news publication makes errors; there are corrections every day. Personally as someone who worked at a newspaper and made mistakes on occasion I resent the idea that that meant I didn’t care.

All the names were compiled from obits that were already published across the country. NYT is one of the few publications that can run a Sunday Page One with zero ads. This pandemic can feel pretty abstract, even for those of us who really care about what’s going on. I’m glad they used the resources and clout they still have to remind us of the human face of this.
posted by girlmightlive at 7:55 AM on May 24, 2020 [51 favorites]


but I think the left places way too much trust in the Times and we need to be reminded that it's run by people who can be self-serving

I'm one of the left and I think the NYT is nearly trash, so.
But in this case, it's not self serving to take notice of the names of the people who have died. Every issue of every newspaper has mistakes, it's normal. These kinds of mistakes can be made in relation to the people who have died from COVID19 because of the sheer amount of people who have died. If 5 people had died, there's no way there would be mistakes made like the errors made in this issue. There's 100k people dead. 100k+, really. PA alone had an additional 20k more deaths than average in April that were not counted in the COVID measures, but gee, isn't that odd?
It is a political issue, now. It's not wrong to take notice of the names of the people who have died due to political incompetence, whether you like the NYT as a whole or not. It's right to take note of the dead, and in this case, that's tied to "why", which inevitably leads to a failure of leadership, a failure of empathy, a failure of humanity. Printing names is just one tiny way that these victims'- victims of negligence, incompetence, cruelty- humanity is restored.
posted by erattacorrige at 7:55 AM on May 24, 2020 [14 favorites]


This is absolutely not why the other side distrusts the "MSM" and acting like there's some simple reasonable steps, in fact corrections, we can do to address the right's grievances is bogus.
posted by Wood at 7:58 AM on May 24, 2020 [37 favorites]


Boborygmus, this was a heart-breaking list to read (and took a long time, and my eyes went cross, and I still kept reading and crying); I can't imagine the difficulty of being the ones to choose names and do the copyediting and data entry and so on.

I'm no fan of the Times, but this front page was the right move. Not about Trump, although the undercurrent of "somebody, everybody, please do something!" is hard to avoid.
posted by allthinky at 7:59 AM on May 24, 2020 [7 favorites]


I think it's remarkable that even the news of half or a quarter as many deaths never prompted anyone to order flags lowered to half staff anywhere in the country.

Without doing an actual nationwide survey, it's not possible to make an assertion like this. Flags are at half staff here in Oakland (the only location I'm able to speak about).
posted by Lexica at 8:33 AM on May 24, 2020 [3 favorites]


First I'll admit we're not flag-flyers here in our home, but I think it's remarkable that even the news of half or a quarter as many deaths never prompted anyone to order flags lowered to half staff anywhere in the country.

Would you mind clarifying? If you mean no one has ordered this regarding deaths from COVID-19, I would like to offer another correction.
posted by Laetiporus at 9:44 AM on May 24, 2020


I won't let my white-hot fury at the current U.S. national administration blind me to the complexities and uncertainties of this pandemic. Eight European countries have per capita mortality rates worse than the U.S.: Ireland, Netherlands, Sweden, France, Italy, U.K., Spain, Belgium. Right-wing denialists are protesting in Germany and elsewhere. Let's mourn our dead and resolve to redouble our efforts - personal and collective.
posted by PhineasGage at 9:45 AM on May 24, 2020 [13 favorites]


The media, especially The New York Times, holds itself to be this hallowed institution of truth-telling, and a mistake like this makes it seem like the Times is more interested in scoring political points against Trump than getting to the facts.

If you're gonna grind an ax against the NYT, do so for the mealy-mouthed "good people on both sides" reportage they did a couple years ago that lead to things being at the state they are.

Just go do it somewhere else, so people can mourn over the dead here. Whoever they are, and whichever names the NYT offers up to us for scruitiny. (After all, they only spotlighted a portion of the 100,000 dead, and it's easy enough to find another name to take the place of someone removed from this particular platform.)
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:01 AM on May 24, 2020 [27 favorites]


This is why the other side distrusts the "MSM."

As mentioned, the “other side” (who is still us, we’re all in this together whether we like it or not) does not distrust mainstream media for actual reasons, they distrust it because the propaganda they mainline daily tells them to. These perspectives and beliefs are not, like, at all empirical, and that’s really important to understand, because they won’t be dissuaded by reasons, either. (The ever-relevant Mr. Swift said it best.)

This is a powerful and timely front page, I’m thankful for the NYT’s work on this. And they’re right: WTF, America? Why are we not more upset at this ongoing, preventable loss of life??
posted by LooseFilter at 10:03 AM on May 24, 2020 [20 favorites]


"Well, it may not be our fault, but it seems like we're handling this a lot worse than every other country."

I think Brazil's got us beat.
posted by Selena777 at 10:27 AM on May 24, 2020


This is why the other side distrusts the "MSM."

No, it's not. Their "distrust" is bad-faith rejection of facts they don't like because they're insufficiently hateful.

Stop pretending these are reasonable people making reasonable decisions. Any "virus hoaxer" over the age of 18 with basic mental competence is a contemptible, vicious human being who deserves no social consideration at all.
posted by praemunire at 10:30 AM on May 24, 2020 [30 favorites]


This is why the other side distrusts the "MSM."

Surely the "other side" mentioned here is the side that was beating the drums of war during the whole build-up to the Iraq war, and they were supporting the disinformation rather than doubting it. They loved the MSM then.
posted by hippybear at 10:33 AM on May 24, 2020 [3 favorites]


Mod note: Wrap up this derail now please. Thank you.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 10:55 AM on May 24, 2020 [14 favorites]


I'm glad they did this. I've been getting so caught up in the day-to-day difficulties and disappointments of living under restrictions and following the political food fight that has ensued over them that I was starting to lose sight of the enormity of this pandemic and how incredibly lucky I am that everyone I care about is currently doing okay. These obituaries and the way they are presented have helped me shift my perspective.
posted by Tuba Toothpaste at 11:53 AM on May 24, 2020 [6 favorites]


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posted by ahimsakid at 12:02 PM on May 24, 2020


Another offering that is similar to NYT effort: The PBS NewsHour's weekly "In Memoriam" segments, with video tributes to a sampling of everyday Americans lost to the pandemic.
posted by JDC8 at 12:13 PM on May 24, 2020 [8 favorites]


This is a place where we worship positive liberty.

Is it? This is the place where we took slavery to its largest extent in human history. In current times we have the highest incareration in the world both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of the population, and don't flinch at putting innocent children in cages and hieleras for indefinite periods of time.

What we worship isn't liberty, it's whiteness.
posted by splitpeasoup at 1:37 PM on May 24, 2020 [16 favorites]


I rage unsubscribed from the New York Times a few years ago for various reasons related to being a leftist Midwesterner tired of how non-New York politics were covered by the NYT, but I give them major props for being one of the first to visibly do the work of public mourning. I really appreciate that effort, and I am extremely moved to see both the names of famous musicians and sanitation workers in the same space.

In my own social media circles, we've been working out our own "this is what the death count means" symbolic equations to make 100,000 more meaningful to our own measures of what big constitutes. 1/3 of our city's population. The equivalent of 2-3 9/11's a week for weeks.

I remember hearing once that capitalism is a worldview without an eschatology, that it cannot conceive of its own death. And I think the demand to reopen the economy even though literally no state has met public health guidelines is directly related to our refusal to acknowledge public mourning, because to publicly mourn would be to acknowledge that the end isn't in sight yet and that our economic system is responsible for many, if not most, of these needless deaths.
posted by mostly vowels at 1:48 PM on May 24, 2020 [11 favorites]


I am one degree of separation from 3 people in the full list of 100,000. These deaths were caused by a virus. As were the millions of deaths in earlier pandemics throughout human history, many of them in eras and cultures that were not capitalist like our own. One of the nations that has taken the fewest precautions - and which is now starting to see a surge in infections - is one often held up here on MetaFilter as a social & economic model: Sweden.

Instead of the local version of "let no good crisis go to waste," can we save the political arguments for another thread and just mourn the dead in this one?
posted by PhineasGage at 2:04 PM on May 24, 2020 [7 favorites]


Mod note: Folks -- keeping this more or less to a mourning topic thread is really the right approach. There are many many other threads to dig in on political awfulness.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 2:24 PM on May 24, 2020 [8 favorites]


One of the things I've been thinking a lot about lately is how effectively and apparently effortlessly many Americans (though I daresay we are hardly unique in this regard) have taught themselves to dismiss the humanity of the people living around them.

It's a running theme that shows up again and again in many forms: "they were old", "they didn't take care of themselves", "they were members of a group that is not like 'us'", "the people dying are 'coastal elites' and not 'real Americans'" and always with the unstated but detectable "..and therefore I don't have to care.." or "..and in my case it will be different because.." And in many ways I'm as worried about this defense mechanism as I am about the direct effects of the virus. Maybe moreso, because I hold out hope that eventually we will find a vaccine for the latter.

Anyway, as frustrated as I sometimes get with the NYT I applaud their decision to explicitly act to humanize the appalling statistics and force us, as a nation, to confront that these numbers are not a scorecard in a game but once-living human beings who are now lost to us forever.
posted by Nerd of the North at 3:21 PM on May 24, 2020 [16 favorites]


Mod note: Comment and a couple replies removed. It is in fact, for fuck's sake, possible to contain a YES BUT THE NYT IS BAD instinct for the duration of one thread on the blue, this shouldn't require multiple mod notes to rerail.
posted by cortex (staff) at 3:43 PM on May 24, 2020 [32 favorites]


Can I shift the tone here a bit and just post Peter Gabriel's song I Grieve here? Because it's a great song that I'd forgotten but which my listening habits brought up to me just now, and maybe it's a good song to have in this thread.

So many are grieving right now. I can't even contemplate.
posted by hippybear at 4:33 PM on May 24, 2020 [3 favorites]


I got to "Jana Prince, 43, Gretna, La. Social worker who had dedicated her life to others." and couldn't take anymore because it was just too sad. She died on April 8, when the death toll was only 16,673.
posted by hydropsyche at 4:51 PM on May 24, 2020 [9 favorites]


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posted by daybeforetheday at 3:39 AM on May 25, 2020


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Eva Cassidy, ”I Know You By Heart”
posted by sallybrown at 7:05 AM on May 25, 2020 [1 favorite]


Is there a text version of the full list available online somewhere? (I find the interactive page impossible to read.)
posted by 168 at 7:11 AM on May 25, 2020 [1 favorite]


Thanks for the corrections upthread about flags at half staff in some areas. I didn’t look around to see which municipalities had chosen to do that on their own, and was focused on the lack of a nationwide proclamation.
posted by emelenjr at 11:05 AM on May 25, 2020 [1 favorite]


The Takeaway spent a good portion of their show on obituaries in the time of COVID today. I thought it was a good listen. I don't see a transcript available anywhere, sorry.
posted by hippybear at 7:50 PM on May 25, 2020 [2 favorites]






I just want to offer my sincere condolences to everyone in this thread who's lost someone to the virus. Everyone's life has value, and as soon as all this started, my first thought was: "but how will we mourn when it's not safe to hold wakes/funerals/viewings/vigils? Who will be there to comfort the dying when the hour of transition grows near, if their families and loved ones cannot be present?"

I pray we don't see another tragedy like this in my lifetime.

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posted by Unicorn on the cob at 7:55 AM on May 26, 2020 [7 favorites]


The U.S. death toll has reached 100,000. (WaPo)
These 100,000 are not nameless numbers, nor are they mostly famous people. They are, overwhelmingly, elderly — in some states, nearly two-thirds of the dead were 80 or older. They are disproportionately poor and black and Latino. Among the younger victims, many did work that allowed others to stay at home, out of the virus’s reach.

For the most part, they have died alone, leaving parents and siblings and lovers and friends with final memories not of hugs and whispered devotion, but of miniature images on a computer screen, tinny voices on the phone, hands pressed against a window.
Faces of the dead (WaPo) The Washington Post is updating weekly this collection of Americans who died of coronavirus.

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posted by katra at 3:49 PM on May 27, 2020 [3 favorites]


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