The number of known COVID-19 deaths in the United States is over 200,000.
It’s hard for me to grasp the total, knowing that each of these was someone’s child, parent, sibling, co-worker, neighbor, friend.
A few days ago when I was working on this post, I needed to look up the population of Broome County, New York, where I live.
It’s about 190,000.
I am imagining the city of Binghamton empty, the University and all the other schools without students and staff, all the towns and villages without people, just the wild creatures and birds alive.
It’s sobering.
In reality, Broome County has lost 85 residents to COVID, each person a loss to their family and community. Somehow, though, my thought experiment in concentrating the loss to our country as the obliteration of our entire county has given me a sense of scale and of grief that the statistics alone did not elicit.
What does 200,000 deaths mean to you?
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Top of JC's Mind 
My entire town. Gone.
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Sobering. It does seem to make a difference to think in personal terms of places we know and love, instead of equating with some distant place that fits the population number but that isn’t familiar.
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So awful
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Yes, especially because so many deaths could have been avoided with good public health policies and interventions.
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Another friend of mine had a similar reflection about the population of Syracuse at the time she was growing up. Nevertheless, these souls for the president are”virtually nobody”.
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which is what is so incredibly sad and disturbing…
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The Washington Post has a new tool where you put in a zip code and it gives a time lapse map of COVID deaths as though they are centered in the zip code you select.
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