A Year of COVID Deaths and Division in America

 by Brian T. Lynch, MSW

February 6, 2021 pandemic data precisely one year from the first COVID-19 death in America

A coronavirus is an otherwise inanimate strand of DNA that replicates under the right conditions. It shares none of the other basic characteristics of a life-form. Yet the first life the novel coronavirus took in this country a year ago today presents a great irony. 

Patricia Dowd of California died of a heart attack a year ago after contracting the virus about a week earlier. She was well under 65 years old. She had no underlying health conditions. She was not obese. She exercised regularly and kept herself fit. She had only moderate flu-like symptoms. She didn’t see a doctor. She was never hospitalized. She died at home of a heart attack. She didn’t know she was dying from COVID-19 and no one else would have ever known if her cause of death hadn’t raised curiosity and concern in a dedicated coroner in Santa Clara County.

The completely atypical presentations in Ms. Dowd’s case highlights many fault lines in a year-long debate that defines our dueling perceptions about the pandemic. The Jekyll and Hyde way that the virus can attack the human body has brought out the Jekyll and Hyde’s in our body politic.

One year since the first U.S. American died of COVID-19 and there is no definitive count of those who have fallen ill or died of the virus since then. Recent Columbia University research just described today in an NPR story suggests the actual number of COVID-19 cases is ten times higher than we know while many pandemic skeptics say the number is much smaller. It seems that there is no national consensus on this or anything. Different sources will offer different sets of data. Every aspect of the pandemic in this country, tracking, tracing, treating, preventing its spread, counting the dead, all of it has fallen into the vortex of a social upheaval we continue to mislabel as politics. Even our great scientific institutions sustained injuries in the media stoked melee unfolding around us. This pandemic arrived at a time in America when every fact generates an anti-fact that cannot be merged without annihilation. Growing uncertainty is the product, if not the purpose, of the disinformation plague that rendered our great nation incapable of mustering a great response.

On a global scale, this country's response to the pandemic is the most spectacular failure in history. With just over 4% of the earth’s human population, we had 26% of all the infections and over 20% of all the deaths. The difference between those proportions represents the suffering and death that could have, and should have been avoided.

By any source, the number of people who have fallen ill or died in the U.S. is staggering. The Worldometer.info source used here caps the year's death toll at 470,705 U.S. Americans. For context, that is more than all of the U.S. combat deaths since General Lee surrendered at the Appomattox Court House in 1865. The number of PCR confirmed cases in this country over the past year is approximately 27.4 million people, about 8% of our population. The fact that a greater percentage of us haven’t gotten ill or died is a testament to the great majority of us who wear our masks, wash our hands and keep our social distance despite counter-cultural pressures opposing these measures.

We should be united this day in memorializing our dead and acknowledging the grief of millions who lost someone they loved this past year, but we are not yet capable of accepting that shared perspective. Until we recognize and disarm the malevolent forces working to divide this great nation we cannot begin to mourn our dead.


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This blog post is the February 6th entry in my Daily Pandemic Diary that I have kept since April of last year. You may open my monthly Diaries from the links provided below.

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