Year three of the pandemic: one million plus dead in America and we’re moving on

997,083.

That’s the number of Americans killed by COVID-19 so far, according to the CDC.

We think of it as a million, if we think of it at all. That’s not just because large statistics are often hard to parse, but also because nobody trusts anybody’s numbers now. COVID-19 testing has fallen off the map, thanks to the success of personal tests, which usually go unreported to public health systems; the lack of interest at local, state, and federal levels to coordinate on data; the utter failure to get things together for wastewater testing (which is really useful!). In the pandemic’s third year, the richest and most technologically advanced country in the world knows less about COVID than it used to.

Before all of that, or in addition to it, we have the problems of politics causing people to mess with data. The CDC published a new community transmission system which effectively downplays infection rates. Donald Trump clearly told us to test less, in order to have fewer “cases.” Some families demand of hospitals that their dead don’t get “COVID” as cause of death.

The CDC’s sunny view of things.

Then we have the knock-on deaths. Those are the people who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, go into hospitals for the care they needed for non-COVID problems. Sometimes the facilities…