Just A Thousand Names On A Front Page

On Memorial Day last Sunday, the New York Times devoted its entire front page to a long list of Americans who have died in the COVID-19 pandemic.

“US Deaths Near 100,000, an Incalculable Loss,” the headline read. “They Were Not Simply Names on a List. They Were Us,” the subhead added.

The list carried 1,000 names, just 1 percent of the nearly 100,000 deaths in the US. Each name had a one-line obituary drawn from death notices in hundreds of US newspapers around the country. On that Sunday, the list of dead Americans totaled 96,662 out of a global total of 340,196. At the rate victims in the US have been dying, the 100,000 mark was expected to be reached in a few days.

That one simple unembellished newspaper page listing a thousand names embodied the vast loss the United States has suffered in the ongoing pandemic. It now has the most victims as a country.