We’ve passed 300,000 deaths due to COVID-19 in the United States. It is hard to know what to say about this scale of death, given that we’ve passed hundred-thousand body-count milestones twice before. And we may reach another before the pandemic ends.
In the absence of something to say, we’ve collected some of the writing on death due to COVID-19 that Slate has published throughout the pandemic. A round number isn’t much different from what we’ve been experiencing for months now, after all. Humans tend to experience death individually, so even though it’s happening on a mass scale right now, we wanted to revisit the perspectives of people who have lost loved ones due to this disease, people who comforted those who were grieving, and the professionals who cared for people as they died. Their stories don’t add up to 300,000 deaths, but we hope they might help you get a little closer to feeling the scale of the tragedy we’re going through anyway.