Remember the Dead This Memorial Day And Redeem Our Losses in the "War" Against the Pandemic

It is crucial that we honor the dead by making the future better for the living

By Jim Miller

 Life is cheap. It’s hard not to think that after the last year during which even the most dire-seeming predictions were frequently overwhelmed by darker realities.  Consider that on this day in 2020 on my old soapbox at the OB Rag, I started my Memorial Day column with this observation:

This Memorial Day it’s time we properly mourn the dead.  During a pandemic that the President has told us is a war against an “invisible enemy,” we are, as of this writing, closing in on 100,000 American dead.  But as we mourn the scores of our fellow Americans, who the President has called “warriors” in this grand battle, we need to also remember that most of them didn’t have to die.  

In that same column I went on to note that Trump’s willful incompetence had already been responsible for more deaths than 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.  At the time, it was infuriating to imagine predictions that the death toll would rise to 157,000 by July and that a huge number of those deaths were preventable if we had more prudent leadership.  

Of course, we did not, and, as we all know, the death toll now stands at over 590,000. In fact, despite the Biden Administration’s excellent work accelerating the vaccine rollout, we will surely end up passing the worst death toll in any American war—the 620,000 Americans who died in the Civil War.  But even that stunning toll is likely a huge underestimation.  

Recently, the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation has estimated that once one considers the “excess mortality” associated with the pandemic, a truer estimate of the human cost is likely 912,345 deaths and counting.  

As jaw-dropping as that figure is, its true import is only made clear when one stops to consider that, as a Lancet study back in February found, at least 40% of those deaths were preventable.  That, along with former Trump Administration Covid-19 Coordinator Deborah Brix echoing this awful truth in March and going further by suggesting that “most deaths” could have been avoided, is almost too much to bear.  

And the culpability goes beyond the Trump Administration to the corporate sector where a study this April found that if Walmart had simply provided two weeks paid sick leave, 7,500 Covid cases could have been prevented.  Extrapolate that beyond this one company to the entire American economy and it’s clear that the push to “reopen” really did mean “go back to work, get sick and die” as I opined last year.  

We didn’t lose the war against the pandemic; too many of our “leaders” simply surrendered.  

Thus, if this incredible waste of life is to be redeemed in any way, it is crucial that we honor the dead by making the future better for the living.  If we don’t come out of the back end of this horrible period with more funding for scientific research and public health, real rights and protections for workers, and a renewed respect for human life, then the ghosts of the myriad dead will haunt our history for a long time to come.  

The era of “acceptable losses” should be over for good.