According to the Johns Hopkins University database, 488,100 Americans have died from COVID-19 as of Feb 17. Globally the pandemic has taken more than 2.4 millions but its real toll is much higher.

Christopher Murray, the director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington in Seattle told CNN that ‘as many as one fifth of coronavirus deaths might not be recorded’.

“We have found that on average, total deaths are 20% higher than reported deaths, the ratio varies substantially across different countries. There are extreme cases such as Ecuador, Peru or Russia where total deaths are 300-500% higher than reported deaths… but where we have data, the average relationship is 20% higher.

Christopher Murray, the director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington in Seattle (source: CNN)

Though these deaths may be just numbers for health administrators or state or federal administrators, ‘These numbers are real people‘ for those who lost their loved ones.

Death Data Honor Lost Lives

In the CNN Health, Deidre McPhillips writes in a recent article that last year on April 16, when New York Gov. Andrew Como was flashing graphs across the screen showing covid hospitalizations, ICU admissions and deaths, Angelina Proia, a New York resident had lost her a fun-loving, kind-hearted and otherwise healthy 66-year-old dad, Richard Proia, to COVID-19 that morning.

It was a small comfort to me to see the leader of my state show deference to the virus that killed my dad. It made me feel less alone. .. But I have my state leader affirming and validating that my dad was a Covid loss and taking it into account when he makes his decisions. By acknowledging my father’s loss through the numbers, I know he’s sorry for my family and takes it seriously.

Angelina Proia (source: CNN)

Since the first case of coronavirus was identified in US more than a year ago, there has been a near constant stream of Covid-19 data collected by multiple organizations including The White House COVID-19 team publishes a daily report with dozens of graphs and tables tracking cases, deaths, test positivity rates, community vulnerability and more, writes McPhillips in CNN Health. “The death toll is approaching half a million. In the past week alone, more than two people died of Covid-19 every minute.”

• ‘These numbers are people’: How Covid-19 death data honors lives lost
• In Our Pandemic Isolation, Every Death Is a Covid Death
• The world marks 2 million coronavirus deaths. The real toll is likely much higher

Mothers, Fathers, Brothers, Sisters

McPhillips writes “As more and more Americans lose loved ones to Covid-19 or fall ill themselves, summarizing very human experiences of fear and grief into statistics may feel cold.”

Talking to CNN, Bob Anderson, chief mortality statistician for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said although he has worked through the HIV epidemic, the opioid epidemic and more over the 24 years but the Covid-19 pandemic is different.

Numbers can be a bit sterile. But these numbers are people — mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters. I have to constantly remind myself of that. … As far as health data go, mortality data is really the only dataset in which we have a record for each person.

Bob Anderson, chief mortality statistician for the CDC (source: CNN)

According to CNN’s McPhillips, West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice ‘reads through each new death, identifying the West Virginians who have recently lost their lives to Covid-19 with these data points: age, gender and home county’.

All I want is these people to be remembered, and I just don’t know of another way to do it right now. If I can give them an ounce of dignity, I will. I would give them a gallon.

Jim Justice, Gov. West Virginia (source: CNN)

Gov Justice told CNN that the connection to each individual death is personal to him, even without knowing their names.

“As you’re moving through the age and the gender and the county, you’re thinking across West Virginia and the close-knit, loving people that live here. Oftentimes, my mind drifts to situations where I’ve been in someone’s home in a specific county or I’ve been on a trout stream in a specific county. In my mind I’m seeing families in these communities at a dinner table or on a picnic or on a trout stream. It’s overwhelming at times.”

Reacting to Gov Justice’s read through the Covid-19 deaths, Luke Velickoff, a registered nurse working in West Virginia University (WVU)’s cardiovascular intensive care unit, said “To hear the words, ‘our 1,743rd death is a fifty-six-year-old female from Barbour County,’ is sobering, to say the very least. The numbers and statistics speak volumes, but when you actually see and spend countless hours with these individuals, it truly reminds you of the humanity of it all.”

In the New York Times, a scholar, teacher, yogi and freelancer Lara N. Dotson-Renta writes that when her friend Mel, “who died of brain cancer on Feb. 8, had matching strands of mala beads, used in meditation. Mel’s will be put with her ashes, and the author will keep hers at her meditation table.”

Being apart from her friend Mel due to brain cancer is subject to one of the most brutal cruelties of the pandemic, writes Dotson-Renta.