On March 11, 2020, four years ago yesterday, the World Health Organization declared that COVID-19 was a pandemic.
Two days later, the Trump administration declared the virus to be a national emergency.
On March 15th, shutdowns began in states across the country.
The first COVID death in the United States had been reported on February 29th.
Near the end of May, the number of deaths, in the country, passed 100,000. This, despite President Trump's assurances that the virus would soon "go away." The virus, he had said on April 3rd--three weeks after his administration announced the national emergency--"is going to go away. It is going away." On June 18th, he said that the virus "is dying out. The numbers are starting to get very good." In July, he said: "I’ll be right eventually. I will be right eventually. You know I said, ‘It’s going to disappear.’ I’ll say it again. It’s going to disappear, and I’ll be right." In August, he said that "it’s gonna be gone soon." He was wrong. By the end of 2020, there were more than 350,000 deaths.
The death count reached 1 million, in the U.S., in May of 2022.
As of March 2, 2024--this from a March 11th ABC News story, online--1.18 million Americans have died due to the virus.
Various studies, though, have suggested that it is probable the number is in fact higher.
One study, as reported last month by the British publication The Guardian, indicated that the actual number of COVID deaths, in America, "is likely at least 16% higher than the official tally."
From the February 21st Guardian story:
“...we find over the first 30 months of the pandemic that serious gaps remained in surveillance,” said Andrew Stokes, associate professor of global health and sociology at Boston University and one of the study’s authors.
“Even though we got a lot better at testing for Covid, we were still missing a lot of official Covid deaths” in the US, said Jennifer Dowd, professor of demography and population health at University of Oxford, who was not involved in this research.
Yet the official numbers, when one looks back, remain staggering.
In one week, during January of 2021, there were nearly 26,000 deaths in the U.S.--the highest weekly figure since the start of the pandemic.
During one week, a year later--from January 30 to February 5, 2022, during the Omicron wave--there were more than 18,000 deaths.
And more recently: in the week ending this past December 9th, there were, in the U.S., more than 1600 deaths due to the virus--as opposed to 163 deaths, the same week, from the flu.
The March 11, 2024 ABC story, referred to above, notes that during the week of March 2nd, there were 576 deaths. COVID deaths have, obviously, been reduced dramatically--yet 576 deaths in a single week is a figure which should not be ignored. I am guessing, though, that any number of Americans--perhaps in part from simple weariness, or perhaps, for some, from a certain sense of defiance--consider the virus to be a thing of the past. One also notes that there are, indeed, many in the country who, during the course of the pandemic, made strenuous efforts to minimize--or simply deny--the virus's deadly severity.
Nevertheless: the issue of memory, as regards COVID, is of great significance. A February story in The Boston Globe reported that the Library of Congress had begun an oral history project, "part of a congressional mandate to preserve the experiences ordinary Americans had during the pandemic..."
A year ago, in mid-March of 2023, as part of the weekly "Brooks and Capehart" segment on the PBS NewsHour, featuring journalists David Brooks and Jonathan Capehart, Mr. Brooks said the following, about the pandemic:
"I don't think we've memorialized the million Americans who died, enough. President Biden, the day before the inauguration, remember he had that ceremony? And it seems like we should do that. We still need to do that more. And so there are a million households who lost somebody. And I think we still haven't quite faced the emotional leftovers of that."
I think of the dedication page of a novel I read in 2022--writer Don Winslow's City on Fire, a work of crime fiction, published by William Morrow, which takes place for the most part in Providence, Rhode Island (a city, I'll mention, where I lived for a number of years, in the 1970s and 1980s). Mr. Winslow dedicated the book to those who had died from the virus:
