We may never know how many people the coronavirus kills: “It sounds like it could be totally obvious — just count body bags. It’s not obvious at all.”
We rely on numbers to understand the size and scope of tragedy — to gauge what went wrong and put the damage in perspective. More Americans have now died from the coronavirus than were killed in the September 11 terrorist attacks, multiple news outlets announced. …
But we likely won’t have an estimate of how many Americans have died as a result of the pandemic for a very long time — maybe months, maybe a year. We will almost certainly never know the exact number. “It sounds like it could be totally obvious — just count body bags,” John Mutter, an environmental-science professor at Columbia University who studies the role of natural disasters in human well-being, told me in an interview this week. “It’s not obvious at all…”
To read the entire article from The Atlantic, click https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/04/how-many-americans-will-die-coronavirus/609175/