1.2 million US citizens died of COVID and morons haven't woken up. Worse, they debate about if that count is true, and pick your favorite conspiracy theories.
It's the habit of mind - what you watch, listen, read and talk becomes actual reality in one's life. Doesn't matter if that is reality outside of one's life. So be careful with who, how, and what you spend the limited time that you have on this planet.
Scott Alexander has a touching piece on this bullshit:
Five years later, we can’t stop talking about COVID. Remember lockdowns? The conflicting guidelines about masks - don’t wear them! Wear them! Maybe wear them! School closures, remote learning, learning loss, something about teachers’ unions. That one Vox article on how worrying about COVID was anti-Chinese racism. The time Trump sort of half-suggested injecting disinfectants. Hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, fluvoxamine, Paxlovid. Those jerks who tried to pressure you into getting vaccines, or those other jerks who wouldn’t get vaccines even though it put everyone else at risk. Anthony Fauci, Pierre Kory, Great Barrington, Tomas Pueyo, Alina Chan. Five years later, you can open up any news site and find continuing debate about all of these things.
The only thing about COVID nobody talks about anymore is the 1.2 million deaths.
That’s 1.2 million American deaths. Globally it’s officially 7 million, unofficially 20 - 30 million. But 1.2 million American deaths is still a lot. It’s more than Vietnam plus 9/11 plus every mass shooting combined - in fact, more than ten times all those things combined. It was the single highest-fatality event in American history, beating the previous record-holder - the US Civil War - by over 50%. All these lives seem to have fallen into oblivion too quietly to be heard over the noise of Lab Leak Debate #35960381.
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Rather than rescue this with appeals to age or some other variable making these deaths not count, I think we should think of it as a bias, fueled by two things. First, dead people can’t complain about their own deaths, so there are no sympathetic victims writing their sob stories for everyone to see2. Second, controversy sells. We fight over lockdowns, lab leaks, long COVID, and vaccines, all of which have people arguing both sides, and all of which let us feel superior to our stupid and evil enemies. But there’s no “other side” to 1.2 million deaths. Thinking about them doesn’t let you feel superior to anyone - just really sad.
This is the same point I try to make in my writings on charity. A million lives is a statistic, but some random annoying controversial thing that captures the public interest is alive and salient - it’s easier to remember a story about a charity that turned out to be corrupt, or offensive, or just cringe, compared to the one that saved 1,000 or 10,000 or 100,000 lives. Even the people who do remember the 10,000 lives have to fight to avoid both-sidesing it - “Well, this charity saved 10,000 lives, but that charity said something cringe on Twitter, so overall it’s kind of a wash”. In the end people average out the whole subject to “Wait, you support charities? But didn’t you hear about that one that turned out to be corrupt? Can’t believe you’d be into something like that.”
I freely admit I don’t know where I’m going with this. If you ask what you should do differently upon being reminded that 1.2 million Americans died during COVID, I won’t have an answer - there’s no gain from scheduling ten minutes to be sad each morning on Google Calendar. I’m not recommending you do anything differently, just remarking how weird it is that this doesn’t automatically come up more of its own accord.
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