> We don’t honor deaths that we ascribe to individual failings, which could explain, Keller argues, why national moments of mourning have been scarce.
I always think of the argument of Eliphaz in the book of Job. It’s interesting that we have this built in belief that illness is connected to moral failings.
Without making a moral judgement on it, I think the largest factor is that on some level societies consider the death of the elderly due to disease natural.
That's mainly because both the US and UK actually had an organised response, mask mandates, banned mass gatherings, ramped up restrictions as hospital admissions rose to try to manage impact on health services, etc. Over here in the UK we also set up an effective vaccination programme very early too, with strong public support and broad political consensus. We did better at it here, sure, but it's not like the US had no policies in place to protect the public.
All of these made a massive difference. Compare to Brazil where the average age of Covid death was only a little over 60, which means the vast majority of people who died there were under retirement age, many of them a lot under. That's what not taking the pandemic seriously looks like. I know Brazil has a younger population, but despite that meaning their demographics were strongly in their favour, they still suffered huge death rates.
Exactly my point, having a much younger population didn’t save them because they didn’t employ effective countermeasures. Even with this huge demographic advantage over e.g the USA they still had a higher death rate per population.
The idea that coronavirus is only a problem for the very old, and countermeasures aren’t necessary to protect younger people (including middle aged people) is just obviously false when you look at countries like Brazil with 600,000 deaths, most of them of working age.
> on some level societies consider the death of the elderly due to disease natural
Of course it is natural!
You have to die of something. Old age weakens us to the point where the body either wears out directly or our cannot mount an adequate response to an otherwise 'ordinary' infection or injury.
What is normal is that people aren't really able to grieve for millions they don't know. Whether it's a pandemic or war or genocide or famine or disease, out of sight out of mind. A lot of virtue signaling and political maneuvering but at the end of the day our in groups just aren't that big and we'll say "oh that's sad" and then move on with our lives.
There's 8 billion of us, millions are always going to be dying, and realistically nobody outside of their friend circles really care.
A simple google search would have shown the author that on average about 2.5 million americans die each year. So millions of americans dying is the norm. Not only that as the population continues to age, the number of deaths will only climb until we hit an inflection point. Besides, what does he want? Americans to be hysterically grieving for eternity? What's with the media and their neverending campaign to have us scared, depressed, angry and self-loathing. Shouldn't we be celebrating that covid wasn't as bad as predicted. I remember in the beginning, some people were predicting 5% or 10% death rate.
> America is accepting not only a threshold of death but also a gradient of death. Elderly people over the age of 75 are 140 times more likely to die than people in their 20s.
The author thinks we shouldn't be accepting of the fact that people in the last stage of their lives have a higher death rate than the people in the prime of their lives?
> It often occurs because of active distortion by politicians and the press, Lewandowsky told me. (For example, a poll that found that mask mandates are favored by 50 percent of Americans and opposed by just 28 percent was nonetheless framed in terms of waning support.)
I think the author has it backwards. The 50% support mask mandates is due to politicians and the press not the 28%. After all, 100% of americans were against mask mandates prior to the politicians and the press pushing mask mandates.
The media will say overpopulation is the cause of climate change and we should feel bad and we need less people. Then they'll say we should feel bad because a few hundred thousand more people died in the US than normal. No matter what, we should be scared, sad, angry, depressed, etc. Then they'll peddle pharmaceutical ads.
I think the covid deaths are usually reported as excess deaths, ie deaths over the normal expected annual.
A lot of people died from covid who otherwise wouldn't have (yet). That's not to say I agree with our failed strategy, but if we can't even believe that covid did kill a bunch of people, eh... nevermind. The country is doomed anyway lol.
> Besides, what does he want? Americans to be hysterically grieving for eternity?
Yes! That makes PR/propaganda significantly easier which is valuable to the people in the PR/propaganda industry (the same people writing the news.) This is why you should tune out things that sound like propaganda.
Why is the Atlantic finding it hard to believe that we are normalising pandemic deaths?
We have done just the same with the HIV/AIDS pandemic, which is still ongoing by the way. People would be surprised to know how many people die of AIDS in the World each year.
And future does not look so bright either. Would not be surprised if we soon have to deal with a third pandemic at the same time.
Did you forget about lockdowns, mask mandates, the unprecedented speed at which we developed and deployed the vaccine, that all news for the last two years were almost all about covid (only recently displaced by the Ukraine war).
You call that normal?! Though it is a completely different thing, it almost makes 9/11 looks like a detail. With 9/11, we had a few days of cancelled flights, and more security checks, with covid, we had months when we couldn't fly at all, and the time we could, we had masks and tests, sometimes even quarantines. Covid is the most world-changing event since WW2.
And all that because we didn't want people to die. We could have let people die, humanity never was is danger of extinction or anything like that. In fact, it could have been a way to "help society get rid of the burden of the elderly" (a common theme among conspiracy theorists). But no, we wanted people to stay alive, as if we weren't monsters.
In fact, many people think we overdid it, a debatable position, but in any way, we are totally not considering it "normal".
I sometimes wonder if I’ll ever feel normal again. I’ve been operating in an exceptional, “emergency” state for too long. Two years ago this week is when everyone I know went remote. “Two weeks to slow the spread”, remember? Life has been forever altered.
The Atlantic is a left leaning mag. From that perspective, the "how could we let it happen like this" was, I believe, specifically about the culture wars: ie how could so many reds let their neighbors die because they valued mask freedom over lives.
As a society we've normalized individual freedom over collective lives as a new value, something which wasn't true in, say, the WW2 era of collective rationing. Half the country was fine letting millions die because they believed some youtuber on masks and vax.
The million covid deaths are being ignored because they're politically embarrassing for Joe Biden and Democrats. Otherwise the NYT would be running a multipage spread listing the names of the deceased. I wish it was more complicated than that but it isn't.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 54.4 ms ] threadI always think of the argument of Eliphaz in the book of Job. It’s interesting that we have this built in belief that illness is connected to moral failings.
All of these made a massive difference. Compare to Brazil where the average age of Covid death was only a little over 60, which means the vast majority of people who died there were under retirement age, many of them a lot under. That's what not taking the pandemic seriously looks like. I know Brazil has a younger population, but despite that meaning their demographics were strongly in their favour, they still suffered huge death rates.
The idea that coronavirus is only a problem for the very old, and countermeasures aren’t necessary to protect younger people (including middle aged people) is just obviously false when you look at countries like Brazil with 600,000 deaths, most of them of working age.
Of course it is natural!
You have to die of something. Old age weakens us to the point where the body either wears out directly or our cannot mount an adequate response to an otherwise 'ordinary' infection or injury.
There's 8 billion of us, millions are always going to be dying, and realistically nobody outside of their friend circles really care.
> America is accepting not only a threshold of death but also a gradient of death. Elderly people over the age of 75 are 140 times more likely to die than people in their 20s.
The author thinks we shouldn't be accepting of the fact that people in the last stage of their lives have a higher death rate than the people in the prime of their lives?
> It often occurs because of active distortion by politicians and the press, Lewandowsky told me. (For example, a poll that found that mask mandates are favored by 50 percent of Americans and opposed by just 28 percent was nonetheless framed in terms of waning support.)
I think the author has it backwards. The 50% support mask mandates is due to politicians and the press not the 28%. After all, 100% of americans were against mask mandates prior to the politicians and the press pushing mask mandates.
The media will say overpopulation is the cause of climate change and we should feel bad and we need less people. Then they'll say we should feel bad because a few hundred thousand more people died in the US than normal. No matter what, we should be scared, sad, angry, depressed, etc. Then they'll peddle pharmaceutical ads.
A lot of people died from covid who otherwise wouldn't have (yet). That's not to say I agree with our failed strategy, but if we can't even believe that covid did kill a bunch of people, eh... nevermind. The country is doomed anyway lol.
Yes! That makes PR/propaganda significantly easier which is valuable to the people in the PR/propaganda industry (the same people writing the news.) This is why you should tune out things that sound like propaganda.
We have done just the same with the HIV/AIDS pandemic, which is still ongoing by the way. People would be surprised to know how many people die of AIDS in the World each year.
And future does not look so bright either. Would not be surprised if we soon have to deal with a third pandemic at the same time.
Did you forget about lockdowns, mask mandates, the unprecedented speed at which we developed and deployed the vaccine, that all news for the last two years were almost all about covid (only recently displaced by the Ukraine war).
You call that normal?! Though it is a completely different thing, it almost makes 9/11 looks like a detail. With 9/11, we had a few days of cancelled flights, and more security checks, with covid, we had months when we couldn't fly at all, and the time we could, we had masks and tests, sometimes even quarantines. Covid is the most world-changing event since WW2.
And all that because we didn't want people to die. We could have let people die, humanity never was is danger of extinction or anything like that. In fact, it could have been a way to "help society get rid of the burden of the elderly" (a common theme among conspiracy theorists). But no, we wanted people to stay alive, as if we weren't monsters.
In fact, many people think we overdid it, a debatable position, but in any way, we are totally not considering it "normal".
As a society we've normalized individual freedom over collective lives as a new value, something which wasn't true in, say, the WW2 era of collective rationing. Half the country was fine letting millions die because they believed some youtuber on masks and vax.