Death counts become the rhythm of the pandemic in the absence of national mourning
5/25/20
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from The Washington Post,
5/24/20:
Johns Hopkins’s coronavirus dashboard is recording 4 billion hits a day in what for many has become a search for meaning
Watchers of the daily death counts are looking for different things: Hints of the future, understanding of the past, a sense of scale, a sense of loss, a wisp of hope.
But as Memorial Day arrives, there have been few organized rituals of collective mourning aside from President Trump’s order to lower flags to half-staff in honor of nearly 100,000 covid-19 deaths. Daily reckonings with mortality counts, meanwhile, have become proxies for images of flag-draped coffins that have become the standard symbol for America’s tragedies.
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