<
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/04/us-1-million-covid-death-rate-grief/629537/>
"The number of people who have died of COVID-19 in the United States has always
been undercounted because such counts rely on often-inaccurate death
certificates. But the total, as the CDC and other official sources suggest,
will soon surpass 1 million. That number—the sum of a million individual
tragedies—is almost too large to grasp, and only a few professions have borne
visceral witness to the pandemic’s immense scale. Alanna Badgley has been an
EMT since 2010, “and the number of people I’ve pronounced dead in the last two
years has eclipsed that of the first 10,” she told me. Hari Close, a funeral
director in Baltimore, told me that he cared for families who “were burying
three or four people weeks apart.” Maureen O’Donnell, an obituary writer at the
Chicago Sun-Times, told me that she usually writes “about people who had a
beautiful arc to their life,” but during the pandemic, she has found herself
writing about lives that were “cut short, like trees being cut down.” On
average, each person who has died of COVID has done so roughly a decade before
their time.
In just two years, COVID has become the third most common cause of death in the
U.S., which means that it is also the third leading cause of grief in the U.S.
Each American who has died of COVID has left an average of nine close relatives
bereaved, creating a community of grievers larger than the population of all
but 11 states. Under normal circumstances, 10 percent of bereaved people would
be expected to develop prolonged grief, which is unusually intense,
incapacitating, and persistent. But for COVID grievers, that proportion may be
even higher, because the pandemic has ticked off many risk factors."
Via Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
