Absolutely gutting to see. And this isn't even the full up-to-date list even for one country. Considering how the government is responding to the virus here, I'm a bit worried the UK newspapers will have to do multiple-page spreads soon enough if they want to do the same.
To preempt the cynics, yes, ultimately, this gesture won't change anything. No politician will look at it and say "Wow, we really should change our ways!" and suddenly find the cure. But it's good to see the media stand behind the people and give the time of day to those who are lost forever. It's a hopeful message, if anything.
Everything turned into numbers and data; X cases, X deaths. We all talk about it so easily, check every day the changes but as far as I can see we lost the connection between these numbers and what they really represent. These numbers are human beings, and the slightest changes, one change even matter a lot. This is a good reminder from NYT in my opinion that numbers are us, actual people dying. Not some random computer-generated stuff. But of course you are right, no human life can change the perception of a politician and the games they play.
In 2003 I asked the NYT to list casualties of the Afghan and Iraq invasions on the front page but they told me they were satisfied to bury them in the middle of the newspaper. It was only ever a few names at a time, and Even that not every day.
Eventually they just stopped printing them at all.
Very much so but I figured that was a position I was definitely not going to make progress on with the NYT via email. I was hoping that Even seeing just the names of Americans might remind people that something horrible was going on “over there far away”.
I edited in “and even that not every day”. I thought if I were less subtle the comment would be downvoted.
You mean the USA invasion to ... and the USA war in... I assume. These crimes are crimes initiated and committed by the USA and the UK for which only Iraqis and afghans had to pay the price.
I'm not trying to belittle those deaths and they should have put them on the first page, but didn't 5000 Americans die in Iraq? At this rate Coronavirus will kill 100 times that :o
> I'm not trying to belittle those deaths and they should have put them on the first page, but didn't 5000 Americans die in Iraq?
Did only americans die in iraq?
> At this rate Coronavirus will kill 100 times that :o
Hundreds of thousands of iraqis died because of the illegal invasion. That's not counting the people who starved or died of disease due to the destabilization of the country due to the invasion.
Also, there is a difference between death by natural causes and murder.
Roughly half a million fatalities in the second Iraq war and about 150K in Afghanistan. (All numbers are of course disputed).
Of those they were about 4.5K and 1.5K US government employees (e.g. soldiers). Those are the only ones the NYT would bother to list, of course, but I had hoped even that meager portion might provoke some attention.
Your position echoes Stalin’s calculus that “quantity has a quality all it’s own. In both cases action (and inaction) by a few caused enormous misery for whole populations, though now the country has used its weapon of ignorance to attack itself.
What really boggles my mind is to consider the next "milestone". The US lost 116,516 in WW1. We're probably less than 2 weeks from reaching that on paper, and probably past that in blood.
We passed 9/11 (on paper) on Mar 28. We passed Vietnam (on paper) on April 20. We're now passing WW1. This is the true scale that's completely evading our imaginations.
It’s somewhere around 400k for ww2. I’m really hoping these numbers don’t become relevant. I was simply trying to make unimaginable numbers, imaginable.
I don't know that they're unimaginable. Right now the death count is about 1.25 times the death count for the 2017-2018 flu season. At any rate it fits within a context of many other illnesses and pandemics, and it makes much more sense to compare this virus to those rather than deaths from war (though there are discussions you could have about the direct relationship between the two in specific cases).
I'm not saying that you're doing so here, but evoking the language of war is a common rhetorical tactic. When you compare the deaths from this disease to wartime casualties it causes people to analyze them in similar ways, when the two have mostly non-overlapping causes, remedies, and knock-on effects. I actually believe that's what the New York Times is attempting to do with today's front page, and I think it's something to be avoided.
Edit: disregard if this turns out to be a bioweapon
It makes me wonder. What if the U.S government had information about a terror attack that will happen in few months and thousands coud die from it, how will they act?
Probably in a lot more serious way than how they act towards this virus.
The world will become a safer place if we spend more on science and less on buying weapons
I don't want to minimise the pandemic- I don't think there is any other way to manage it than the one every sensible government is taking. But- a but was coming- the count of the deaths is a really rough way to estimate its damage. A better one would be the total number of years of life expectancy lost. This epidemic is very dangerous for everyone but it's mostly killing people who were towards the end of their life. It is still tragic but it's different from deaths of random people in every age bracket.
I'm not sure we can actually calculate that - especially given the permanent damage left to lungs, heart and kidneys - we don't actually know how many years this is going to take off survivors.
If you survive covid at 20 and die at 50 of complications, do we count this as -30 years life expectancy, or disregard it from your numbers completely?
Deaths is a very rough metric, and we're struggling to get even that right. I've no problems coming up with any other metric you prefer, as long as we can make it more accurate, not less.
> especially given the permanent damage left to lungs, heart and kidneys - we don't actually know how many years this is going to take off survivors
I don't think this is fearmongering per se, but I'm a bit fed up with this line of thinking.
We're playing with fire by surmising there's hidden harms (who's quantifying? is there even evidence this is happening to many survivors? I don't care if there's evidence it's happened to one person, we need demonstrable proof of very widespread damage, but I just don't see that being passed around as a possibility) and outright ruining people's livelihoods.
I honestly don’t think we know yet. I think most resources are being pumped into things that are actionable.
I’m not trying to fear-monger. But if people want to come up with “alternative” statistics, I think they need to be justifiable. There’s been a lot of debate around cases vs deaths, and our margin of error on each.
IMHO unless they can make “potential years lost” at least as accurate as any of our working figures, all they’re presenting is “it doesn’t matter, they’re just old people” masquerading as intelligence.
That we can’t properly quantify this is precisely my problem.
(To be clear, I don’t think any of these metrics should be linked to lockdown. Personally, my entirely uneducated, armchair opinion is that the primary metric for this should be the percentage capacity of medical facilities. All I ask is that we figure out how best to make solid numbers actionable, rather than how to reinvent the numbers to suit our cause.)
Of course not, but we all shrug at the many thousands of deaths related to respiratory illness that occur among the geriatric and the morbidly obese every year, not the mention the millions of Americans who die each year from various other causes. This wasn't some printing error where the New York Times accidentally printed its obituaries on the front page, and its editors don't believe these people are particularly worthy of being memorialized. The New York Times is making a statement about the size and scope of the disease, and attempting to make an emotional appeal, and it is that statement to which the original poster is responding.
If I were more cynical, I'd say that certain journalistic outlets have a business model built on war coverage and commentary. Since they haven't been gifted one in recent years they've used this illness to fill in. This front page is a cliche; the type of depression poetry one writes in middle school, and its purpose is to draw out an emotional response in you and limit serious debate. It's the journalistic equivalent of selling an all-white canvas. I have no doubt it will win a Pulitzer.
To preempt the cynics, yes, ultimately, this gesture won't change anything. No politician will look at it and say "Wow, we really should change our ways!" and suddenly find the cure. But it's good to see the media stand behind the people and give the time of day to those who are lost forever. It's a hopeful message, if anything.