There Is Nothing Normal about One Million People Dead from COVID

[Nevilledog]

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Christy Thornton
@llchristyll
This piece by ⁦@thrasherxy⁩ is so important. I can feel this normalization - this manufacturing of consent to mass death - happening to me as I read all these pundit & politico calls to get back to ‘normal.’ It’s so insidious and enraging.

scientificamerican.com
There Is Nothing Normal about One Million People Dead from COVID
Mass media and policy makers are pushing for a return to pre‐COVID times while trying to normalize a staggering death toll
6:48 AM · Feb 11, 2022

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/there-is-nothing-normal-about-one-million-people-dead-from-covid1/

Sometime in the next few weeks, the official death toll for the two-year COVID pandemic in the U.S. will reach one million. Despite being the wealthiest nation on the planet, the U.S. has continued to have the most COVID infections and deaths per country, by far, and it has the highest per capita death rate of any wealthy nation.

This is an unfathomable number of people dead, yet, mass media are downplaying it. This is despite an empathetic New York Times headline in May 2020 of “U.S. Deaths Near 100,000, an Incalculable Loss,” and using its entire front page to print names of some of the deceased. As Luppe B. Luppen noted on Twitter, the newspaper’s more recent headline was the cruel and callous “900,000 Dead, but Many Americans Move On.”

The Times is not alone; several large mainstream publications, in complicity with politicians of both major political parties, have been beating a death knell of a drum for getting “back to normal” for months. The effect is the manufactured consent to normalize mass death and suffering—to subtly suggest to Americans that they want to move on.

News media are helping to shape public opinion in order for business to return to the very circumstances that have created this ongoing crisis. A return to normal will allow profits to be reaped by people working relatively safely from their homes (the target audience of many news organizations’ advertisers) at the expense of people working or studying in person who are more vulnerable.

*snip*

[albacore]

1. I'm already thinking about the NEXT pandemic...

The anti-vaxxers and "Free-dumb" people will still be with us... yammering about how they made it thru Covid and not to trust science, etc. And the new one is "just the flu"... like Covid was.... And all the other bullshit rationalizations.
The next pandemic might not be as gentle as this one is/was.

[peggysue2]

6. The next pandemic worries me as well

A scourge that is just as infectious (if not more) and far more deadly. The infection/fatality numbers for the US are a monstrous tragedy brought on by ignorance and widespread misinformation/disinformation.

I don't see the cult-like refusal of vaccines dissipating any time soon.

And that could prove to be utterly catastrophic. For everyone!

[Klaralven]

2. It's about a 16% increase over the normal death rate

[albacore]

5. Wait until the numbers-crunchers are done with this one. Gonna be well over a million. nt

[csziggy]

7. It could take years - they're still adjusting the deaths from the San Francisco earthquake

And the "Spanish" flu pandemic. I think they are still arguing the number of deaths from the Black Plague!

Pretty much every government wants to minimize the death rates from any disaster. It's not until those in charge are long gone before a more objective count can be constructed.

100 years later, quake's dead still being counted

Updating the accounts: global mortality of the 1918-1920 "Spanish" influenza pandemic

The Black Plague’s death toll is fiercely debated, with many historians estimating that between 25 million and 200 million people died in the space of five years. That’s a range of 5 percent to 40 percent of the world’s population at the time.

[albacore]

8. Kinda hard to re-interpret and spin "excess deaths" in the computer age. nt

[csziggy]

9. Just think of all the people who were not ascribed to Covid-19

By the various states. Or who refused to acknowledge that they even had it.

I know I don't trust the numbers from Florida - and how many other states have fudged the numbers?

It is just as easy to spin the numbers in the computer age as it was when they were keeping toll on parchment.

[dalton99a]

12. +1. We'll never know the real numbers in China

[samplegirl]

3. When I sit and just think of

all the people I know who have died from Covid.
Most of them in the beginning before the vax.
Incredible how many people I knew dead from this dreadful
pandemic.

[albacore]

4. Beyond the expense of caring for the victims... and the heartbreak...and the load on docs and nurses

...it seems like a particularly ugly way to die.
I'm thinking of having "DO NOT INTUBATE" tattooed on my chest. Not kidding, either.

[Blue Owl]

10. And we have Bodybags von Burnbags to thank for that

[DFW]

11. Oh, yes there is: in Republican world, that is

They believe in a slight variation on Darwin’s theory:

Survival of the fattest (cats, that is).