COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW – 09/06/2020
Jon Allsop
IN EARLY MAY, Charlie Warzel, a columnist at the New York Times, saw a tweet that hit him “like a ton of bricks.” In the tweet, Eric Nelson, who works in book publishing, imagined a future in which Americans simply get used to the death toll from COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus. Warzel wondered if we might be there already. “The day I read Mr. Nelson’s tweet, 1,723 Americans were reported to have died from the virus,” he wrote. “And yet their collective passing was hardly mourned. After all, how to distinguish those souls from the 2,097 who perished the day before or the 1,558 who died the day after?” He went on to compare the possible normalization of COVID deaths to the normalization of deaths caused by gun violence.