People be very careful this virus is not done yet
- Thread starter easy_b
- Start date
"After older people and nursing home residents, perhaps no group has been harder hit by the pandemic than people with diabetes. Several studies suggest that 30 to 40 percent of all coronavirus deaths in the United States have occurred among people with diabetes, a sobering figure that has been subsumed by other grim data from a public health disaster that is on track to claim a million American lives sometime this month."
www.nytimes.com
Covid and Diabetes, Colliding in a Public Health Train Wreck (Published 2022)
After older people and nursing home residents, no group perhaps has been harder hit by the pandemic than people with diabetes. Experts hope policymakers will take notice, and finally get serious about tackling the nation’s diabetes crisis.
Interesting but this virus really took a chunk out of the white population in the states. In the beginning they thought it was only fucking with blacks and brown people but that quickly change."After older people and nursing home residents, perhaps no group has been harder hit by the pandemic than people with diabetes. Several studies suggest that 30 to 40 percent of all coronavirus deaths in the United States have occurred among people with diabetes, a sobering figure that has been subsumed by other grim data from a public health disaster that is on track to claim a million American lives sometime this month."
Covid and Diabetes, Colliding in a Public Health Train Wreck (Published 2022)
After older people and nursing home residents, no group perhaps has been harder hit by the pandemic than people with diabetes. Experts hope policymakers will take notice, and finally get serious about tackling the nation’s diabetes crisis.
Could this be why things have slowed down?
It really slow down because it was a wave but the next wave is coming from China whether we like it or not
I'm still not buying "it's mostly white folks who've succumbed to this". Maybe more by ratio since they outnumber us, but blacks and Mexicans took the brunt of the deaths. Ours are just less publicized. Most essential employees are minorites. When the few lockdowns occurred, whites, with the better jobs, were able to stay at home, while ours had to show up at work. Factor all of that in
No mostly white people took the brunt of this
I know you've posted the data before, but It just doesn't jive. Remember, I'm talking about ratios.
America Is Staring Down Its First So What? Wave
If the United States has been riding a COVID-19 ’coaster for the past two-plus years, New York and a flush of states in the Northeast have consistently been seated in the train’s front car. And right now, in those parts of the country, coronavirus cases are, once again, going up. The rest of America may soon follow, now that BA.2—the more annoying, faster-spreading sister of the original Omicron variant, BA.1—has overtaken its sibling to become the nation’s dominant version of SARS-CoV-2.
Technologically and immunologically speaking, Americans should be well prepared to duel a new iteration of SARS-CoV-2, with two years of vaccines, testing, treatment, masking, ventilation, and distancing know-how in hand. Our immunity from BA.1 is also relatively fresh, and the weather’s rapidly warming. In theory, the nation could be poised to stem BA.2’s inbound tide, and make this variant’s cameo our least devastating to date.
But theory, at this point, seems unlikely to translate into practice. As national concern for COVID withers, the country’s capacity to track the coronavirus is on a decided downswing. Community test sites are closing, and even the enthusiasm for at-home tests, whose results usually aren’t reported, seems to be on a serious wane; even though Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced a new deal on domestic pandemic funding, those patterns could stick. Testing and case reporting are now so “abysmal” that we’re losing sight of essential transmission trends, says Jessica Malaty Rivera, a research fellow at Boston Children’s Hospital. “It’s so bad that I could never look at the data and make any informed choice.” Testing is how individuals, communities, and experts stay on top of where the virus is and whom it’s affecting; it’s also one of the main bases of the CDC’s new guidance on when to mask up again. Without it, the nation’s ability to forecast whatever wave might come around next is bound to be clouded.
Read: America is about to test how long “normal” can hold
We can’t react to a wave we don’t see coming. “I keep thinking back to this idea of If we don’t measure it, it won’t happen,” says Shweta Bansal, an infectious-disease modeler at Georgetown University. (As President Donald Trump once put it, “If we stop testing, we’d have fewer cases.”) In reality, “it’s very well happening, and we just don’t see it yet.” There is still no guarantee that the next wave is nigh—but if it is, the U.S. is poorly positioned to meet it. Americans’ motivational tanks are near empty; the country’s stance has, for months, been pretty much whatevs. The next wave may be less a BA.2 wave, and more a so what? wave—one many Americans care little to see, because, after two years of crisis, they care so little to respond.
Colloquially, epidemiologically, a wave is a pretty squishy term, a “know it when you see it” notion that gets subjective, fast. “There is no technical definition,” says C. Brandon Ogbunu, a mathematical modeler studying infectious-disease dynamics at Yale. And with COVID-19, there’s no consensus among experts on exactly when waves begin or end, or how sharp or tall one must be to count.
A reasonable delineation for a wave might involve an unexpected deviation from a baseline low—a sudden and sustained uptick in cases that eventually trends back down. That concept might seem intuitive, and yet it’s rife with assumptions: Unexpected, baseline, sudden, sustained—all of these require prior intel on how a disease typically behaves, says Justin Lessler, an infectious-disease modeler at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Researchers have spent decades building those knowledge bases for diseases like the flu. But “we don’t know what ‘normal’ conditions for COVID-19 are going to look like yet,” he told me.
That makes the start of a wave tough to identify even when testing data abound; no single inflection point guarantees a shift from not a wave to definitely a wave. Technically, the BA.1 wave that reached its zenith in mid-January may not have even ended yet, because experts haven’t decided what threshold it would need to reach to do so. Lessler proposed that last summer’s pre-Delta nadir might serve as a tentative benchmark. “If we were sustained there, it wouldn’t be the worst thing ever,” he told me. But despite the relief much of the nation has been feeling the past couple of months, “most places haven’t even gotten there.”
Still, new waves can begin before their predecessors conclude. The experts I spoke with said that an increase in SARS-CoV-2 cases that ratcheted up counts by more than a couple percentage points a week, lasted at least 14ish days, and impacted a large swath of the country, would definitely trip alarm bells. On the whole, the United States does not seem to be at alarm-bell level quite yet, Ogbunu told me. Maybe, if cases don’t rise sharply enough, or to a high enough amplitude, the country won’t get there with BA.2 at all. But it’s too soon to tell. The latest estimates put BA.2 at the root of about 70 percent of sequenced infections in the United States. That’s right past the proportion at which BA.2 started putting a serious squeeze on other countries, says Sam Scarpino, the managing director of pathogen surveillance at the Rockefeller Foundation. “Once you get into the 50 to 60 percent BA.2 range is when you see cases going up,” he told me. Experts can’t yet know if the U.S. will be more resilient, or less.
Watching only the national curve can also be misleading. Country-wide data show only a gargantuan average; these numbers smooth and conceal the case rises that have already been erupting in isolated patchworks. That sort of variability is a product of where humans have carried this new subvariant; of the immune landscape that vaccinations and past versions of the virus have left behind; and of the local defenses, such as masking (or not), that people are leveraging against BA.2, says Bansal, who’s been leading efforts to map how different communities will be impacted by future variants. And patchiness is to be expected. And these more regional waves still matter, even if they seem at first easier to ignore.
Read: Will Omicron leave most of us immune?
They will, in many cases, mark the places least prepared to weather another surge in infections. Tests, while more abundant, have remained inaccessible to many of those who need them; without tests, treatments, too, will drift out of reach. And Malaty Rivera worries that, even now, we don’t know which parts of the country are being hardest hit, thanks to underdiagnosis and underreporting. Some places that appear to be coasting on plateaus or trending down may not be as well positioned as they first seem. Wastewater surveillance, which homes in on virus particles extruded in waste, could help—but these monitoring sites aren’t distributed evenly, either. As things stand, the national map of where the virus is moving is full of blank spots and dark patches. Even unmeasured waves, if they grow big enough, have ways of breaking over us. At worst, the virus could eventually surprise us with a rash of hospitalizations—a sign that the initial bump of cases, one we should have responded to, is already in our rearview mirror.
Not all case rises have to spell disaster. Since November, when Omicron was first identified, more Americans have been vaccinated for the first time, or boosted, or infected; rapid tests have become more available; and the oral antiviral Paxlovid has hit far more pharmacy shelves. All these factors, plus a springtime flocking into the outdoors, especially in the northern U.S., could help blunt a potential wave’s peak; some may even help uncouple a rise in infections from a secondary surge in hospitalizations and deaths. “Those are the numbers I’m more interested in,” says David S. Jones, a historian of science at Harvard University. If cases go up, but the most severe outcomes stay trim, Jones told me, he’ll feel far less concerned; this wave won’t have to feel like the one the country just weathered, by any stretch.
It’s certainly a reasonable future to hope for, but not an outcome that can be taken for granted. Even now, less than half of Americans are boosted, and health-care systems and their workers are reeling from the most recent surge. And although the Senate has reached a deal on an additional $10 billion of emergency funds for pandemic prevention efforts, that sum is less than half of the original $22.5 billion the Biden administration originally asked for. Without more money to keep mitigation tools flowing freely into the community, Bansal also worries about the implications of focusing too hard on hospitalizations. Taking a so-what approach until a substantial number of severe cases show up, as CDC guidance advises Americans do, is “just too late,” she told me. “The story’s already been written for those individuals who have been infected.” Nor are hospitalizations and deaths the only outcomes that matter, as millions of people in the United States alone continue to grapple with the debilitating symptoms of long COVID, which vaccines only partly diminish.
Outbreaks are dialogues; rises in cases can be driven by a new version of the virus, but also by us. Nearly two years ago, Jones and Stefan Helmreich, an anthropologist at MIT, warned that speaking of epidemics as waves casts them “as natural phenomena”—disasters that blow through us, in ways beyond our control. But the trajectory of an epidemic is actually “deeply shaped by human action, both before such disasters hit and as they are managed,” they wrote. Waves don’t just happen to us. They are also, unlike the ocean swells they evoke, shaped by us. Scientifically, calling whatever’s coming a “BA.2 wave” is fair, because BA.2 is ousting its competitors. Still, its peculiarities—or the peculiarity of any next wave—might be less about the quirks of the variants involved and more about how readily we respond. (Certainly, if it’s not BA.2 that troubles us imminently, it’ll be another SARS-CoV-2 offshoot.)
Human actions can slow rises in cases. They can also accelerate them. And when infections take off, it’s not always easy to tell who holds the steering wheel—pathogen or host. “Every outbreak since the beginning of humankind has a behavioral component, an immunological component, and a viral component,” Yale’s Ogbunu told me. “Where one ends and another begins is never completely clear.” But Americans are too far along in this pandemic, and too familiar with the tools we need to manage it, to shirk culpability entirely. Pre-vaccine variants pummeled us when we were poorly defended. The antibody-dodging BA.1 circumvented some of our immune shields. BA.2 isn’t a perfect match for our shots, either. And yet, fresh off of its sibling’s winter crush, we would be remiss to be twice fooled.
The Atlantic’s COVID-19 coverage is supported by grants from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
That makes the start of a wave tough to identify even when testing data abound; no single inflection point guarantees a shift from not a wave to definitely a wave. Technically, the BA.1 wave that reached its zenith in mid-January may not have even ended yet, because experts haven’t decided what threshold it would need to reach to do so. Lessler proposed that last summer’s pre-Delta nadir might serve as a tentative benchmark. “If we were sustained there, it wouldn’t be the worst thing ever,” he told me. But despite the relief much of the nation has been feeling the past couple of months, “most places haven’t even gotten there.”
Still, new waves can begin before their predecessors conclude. The experts I spoke with said that an increase in SARS-CoV-2 cases that ratcheted up counts by more than a couple percentage points a week, lasted at least 14ish days, and impacted a large swath of the country, would definitely trip alarm bells. On the whole, the United States does not seem to be at alarm-bell level quite yet, Ogbunu told me. Maybe, if cases don’t rise sharply enough, or to a high enough amplitude, the country won’t get there with BA.2 at all. But it’s too soon to tell. The latest estimates put BA.2 at the root of about 70 percent of sequenced infections in the United States. That’s right past the proportion at which BA.2 started putting a serious squeeze on other countries, says Sam Scarpino, the managing director of pathogen surveillance at the Rockefeller Foundation. “Once you get into the 50 to 60 percent BA.2 range is when you see cases going up,” he told me. Experts can’t yet know if the U.S. will be more resilient, or less.
Watching only the national curve can also be misleading. Country-wide data show only a gargantuan average; these numbers smooth and conceal the case rises that have already been erupting in isolated patchworks. That sort of variability is a product of where humans have carried this new subvariant; of the immune landscape that vaccinations and past versions of the virus have left behind; and of the local defenses, such as masking (or not), that people are leveraging against BA.2, says Bansal, who’s been leading efforts to map how different communities will be impacted by future variants. And patchiness is to be expected. And these more regional waves still matter, even if they seem at first easier to ignore.
Read: Will Omicron leave most of us immune?
They will, in many cases, mark the places least prepared to weather another surge in infections. Tests, while more abundant, have remained inaccessible to many of those who need them; without tests, treatments, too, will drift out of reach. And Malaty Rivera worries that, even now, we don’t know which parts of the country are being hardest hit, thanks to underdiagnosis and underreporting. Some places that appear to be coasting on plateaus or trending down may not be as well positioned as they first seem. Wastewater surveillance, which homes in on virus particles extruded in waste, could help—but these monitoring sites aren’t distributed evenly, either. As things stand, the national map of where the virus is moving is full of blank spots and dark patches. Even unmeasured waves, if they grow big enough, have ways of breaking over us. At worst, the virus could eventually surprise us with a rash of hospitalizations—a sign that the initial bump of cases, one we should have responded to, is already in our rearview mirror.
Not all case rises have to spell disaster. Since November, when Omicron was first identified, more Americans have been vaccinated for the first time, or boosted, or infected; rapid tests have become more available; and the oral antiviral Paxlovid has hit far more pharmacy shelves. All these factors, plus a springtime flocking into the outdoors, especially in the northern U.S., could help blunt a potential wave’s peak; some may even help uncouple a rise in infections from a secondary surge in hospitalizations and deaths. “Those are the numbers I’m more interested in,” says David S. Jones, a historian of science at Harvard University. If cases go up, but the most severe outcomes stay trim, Jones told me, he’ll feel far less concerned; this wave won’t have to feel like the one the country just weathered, by any stretch.
It’s certainly a reasonable future to hope for, but not an outcome that can be taken for granted. Even now, less than half of Americans are boosted, and health-care systems and their workers are reeling from the most recent surge. And although the Senate has reached a deal on an additional $10 billion of emergency funds for pandemic prevention efforts, that sum is less than half of the original $22.5 billion the Biden administration originally asked for. Without more money to keep mitigation tools flowing freely into the community, Bansal also worries about the implications of focusing too hard on hospitalizations. Taking a so-what approach until a substantial number of severe cases show up, as CDC guidance advises Americans do, is “just too late,” she told me. “The story’s already been written for those individuals who have been infected.” Nor are hospitalizations and deaths the only outcomes that matter, as millions of people in the United States alone continue to grapple with the debilitating symptoms of long COVID, which vaccines only partly diminish.
Outbreaks are dialogues; rises in cases can be driven by a new version of the virus, but also by us. Nearly two years ago, Jones and Stefan Helmreich, an anthropologist at MIT, warned that speaking of epidemics as waves casts them “as natural phenomena”—disasters that blow through us, in ways beyond our control. But the trajectory of an epidemic is actually “deeply shaped by human action, both before such disasters hit and as they are managed,” they wrote. Waves don’t just happen to us. They are also, unlike the ocean swells they evoke, shaped by us. Scientifically, calling whatever’s coming a “BA.2 wave” is fair, because BA.2 is ousting its competitors. Still, its peculiarities—or the peculiarity of any next wave—might be less about the quirks of the variants involved and more about how readily we respond. (Certainly, if it’s not BA.2 that troubles us imminently, it’ll be another SARS-CoV-2 offshoot.)
Human actions can slow rises in cases. They can also accelerate them. And when infections take off, it’s not always easy to tell who holds the steering wheel—pathogen or host. “Every outbreak since the beginning of humankind has a behavioral component, an immunological component, and a viral component,” Yale’s Ogbunu told me. “Where one ends and another begins is never completely clear.” But Americans are too far along in this pandemic, and too familiar with the tools we need to manage it, to shirk culpability entirely. Pre-vaccine variants pummeled us when we were poorly defended. The antibody-dodging BA.1 circumvented some of our immune shields. BA.2 isn’t a perfect match for our shots, either. And yet, fresh off of its sibling’s winter crush, we would be remiss to be twice fooled.
The Atlantic’s COVID-19 coverage is supported by grants from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
@tallblacknyc
I swear you get on my last nerve.
nypost.com
I swear you get on my last nerve.
Yankee Stadium waitress files lawsuit against Adams’ athlete vax exemption
A veteran waitress at Yankee Stadium has filed a lawsuit to overturn Mayor Eric Adams’ “despicable” vaccine exemption for pro athletes on Friday.
nypost.com
People in Maryland wear their masks while Virginians don’t and end up mixing in DC.
Getting tough to control. Need to go back to teleworking and mask mandates.
The Gridiron Club superspreader event shows we can't just go back to normal
Among those who've since tested positive: Gina Raimondo, Merrick Garland, Tom Vilsack, and Valerie Biden Owens.
www.motherjones.com
@easy_b
They are vaccinated but they need to be carefulThe Gridiron Club superspreader event shows we can't just go back to normal
Among those who've since tested positive: Gina Raimondo, Merrick Garland, Tom Vilsack, and Valerie Biden Owens.
@easy_b
^^^^
This powerful Covid-19 mitigation measure is invisible
With mask mandates virtually gone and vaccinaton rates at a standstill, there's one mitigation measure that can still make a big difference: ventilation.
www.cnn.com
In Washington's Covid-19 outbreak, new variants flout old 'close contact' rule
Washington is coping with a rash of high-profile Covid-19 cases after a series of public events have exposed high-level officials.
www.cnn.com
In Washington's Covid-19 outbreak, new variants flout old 'close contact' rule
By Brenda Goodman, CNN
Updated 3:33 PM ET, Fri April 8, 2022
(CNN)Washington, DC is coping with a cluster of high-profile Covid-19 cases after a series of public events exposed high-level officials.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Sens. Susan Collins and Raphael Warnock, and Rep. Peter DeFazio have all this week announced that they tested positive.
Health experts say the outbreak may be rooted, in part, in outdated and confusing guidelines from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that help people assess their risk of getting the virus that causes Covid-19 or passing it on to others.
Should you get your second booster shot now?
On Thursday, after announcing that she had been in close contact with someone who had tested positive for Covid-19, Vice President Kamala Harris presided over the Senate confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson without wearing a mask, though CDC guidelines advise masking around other people for at least 10 days after exposure to the virus.
The same day, at a press event for World Health Day, Xavier Becerra, secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, explained that he and World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreysesus would both be wearing masks at the event -- except while speaking -- "because each of us has been close to someone who tested positive recently."
Health experts said Friday that Americans are relying on CDC guidance that's overdue for an update.
Origins of the 6-foot rule
Since the early days of the pandemic, the CDC has defined someone who's a "close contact" -- and is therefore at risk of contracting and spreading the virus -- as someone who has spent a cumulative total of at least 15 minutes within 6 feet of another person who has lab-confirmed Covid-19 or who's been told they have Covid-19 by a doctor.
BA.2, where are you? Dominant strain hasn't shown signs of starting a surge
With newer, more contagious variants such as BA.2 on the loose, Kimberly Prather, an aerosol scientist at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, said the rule needs rethinking.
"Fifteen minutes and 6 feet was not really useful in the first place," she said. "We know people get infected in less time and longer distanced."
Prather thinks the rule for close contact should have been based on anyone sharing the air in a room for a certain number of minutes.
Distance, specifically the distance of 6 feet, has been in the infection equation since in the late 1800s, when a scientist named Carl Flugge figured out that infections could be transmitted by respiratory droplets through the air. He recommended separating people to prevent infections. Scientists tested it using glass plates and came up with a distance of 6 feet.
In the 1930s, another scientist, William F. Wells, figured out that although some droplets that come from the mouth or nose are large and fall to the ground quickly -- within 3 to 6 feet -- sick people can also emit smaller virus-filled aerosols that float in the air for minutes or even hours. Those can also be infectious.
Evidence of airborne spread
Since March 2020, when 52 members of a choir in Skagit County, Washington, got Covid-19 after attending practice with just one person who was sick, health officials have known that the virus that causes Covid-19 can be transmitted by smaller aerosols, making distance less important than ventilation and time.
Yet the CDC continues to factor 6 feet into its risk equations.
In response to a question from CNN, a CDC spokesperson said Thursday that the agency was not planning to change the close contact definition "at this time."
FDA vaccine advisers say a plan for updating Covid-19 shots is needed
"If you were part of an event where there's multiple infections, you will have been exposed. I don't care if it's 6 feet or 15," said Dr. Carlos Del Rio, an infectious disease specialist at Emory University.
If you're exposed but up to date on your vaccinations, Del Rio said, you should watch for symptoms and wear a mask for 10 days, which is what the CDC says, too.
"If I was in that room with Pelosi and others where they got infected, I would consider myself a close contact because I was there," he said. It's not known exactly where Pelosi was infected, but she was among lawmakers who appeared maskless with President Biden at a signing ceremony on Wednesday. According to CDC guidelines, Pelosi was not considered to be a close contact of the President, the White House said in a statement.
That's closer to the way some other countries have defined exposure.
Until February, when the UK began to roll back its pandemic restrictions, health authorities there defined a close contact more broadly. Their definition included anyone who:
Linsey Marr, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech University who studies aerosols, said the CDC needs to take another look at its contact precautions.
"I do think they should update it, because I think it's based on outdated thinking about transmission," she said.
Get CNN Health's weekly newsletter
Sign up here to get The Results Are In with Dr. Sanjay Gupta every Tuesday from the CNN Health team.
Marr said the CDC probably made the cutoffs of 6 feet and 15 minutes to try to make the best use of limited public health resources such as contract tracing.
"It's based more on convenience than on science at this point," she said.
Marr said that all superspreading events have four things in common: lots of talking, shouting or singing; long exposure times; poor ventilation; and no masks.
"If you have that type of situation, then I would say everyone in the room is potentially exposed," she said.
www.cnn.com
By Brenda Goodman, CNN
Updated 3:33 PM ET, Fri April 8, 2022
(CNN)Washington, DC is coping with a cluster of high-profile Covid-19 cases after a series of public events exposed high-level officials.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Sens. Susan Collins and Raphael Warnock, and Rep. Peter DeFazio have all this week announced that they tested positive.
Health experts say the outbreak may be rooted, in part, in outdated and confusing guidelines from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that help people assess their risk of getting the virus that causes Covid-19 or passing it on to others.
Should you get your second booster shot now?
On Thursday, after announcing that she had been in close contact with someone who had tested positive for Covid-19, Vice President Kamala Harris presided over the Senate confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson without wearing a mask, though CDC guidelines advise masking around other people for at least 10 days after exposure to the virus.
The same day, at a press event for World Health Day, Xavier Becerra, secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, explained that he and World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreysesus would both be wearing masks at the event -- except while speaking -- "because each of us has been close to someone who tested positive recently."
Health experts said Friday that Americans are relying on CDC guidance that's overdue for an update.
Origins of the 6-foot rule
Since the early days of the pandemic, the CDC has defined someone who's a "close contact" -- and is therefore at risk of contracting and spreading the virus -- as someone who has spent a cumulative total of at least 15 minutes within 6 feet of another person who has lab-confirmed Covid-19 or who's been told they have Covid-19 by a doctor.
BA.2, where are you? Dominant strain hasn't shown signs of starting a surge
With newer, more contagious variants such as BA.2 on the loose, Kimberly Prather, an aerosol scientist at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, said the rule needs rethinking.
"Fifteen minutes and 6 feet was not really useful in the first place," she said. "We know people get infected in less time and longer distanced."
Prather thinks the rule for close contact should have been based on anyone sharing the air in a room for a certain number of minutes.
Distance, specifically the distance of 6 feet, has been in the infection equation since in the late 1800s, when a scientist named Carl Flugge figured out that infections could be transmitted by respiratory droplets through the air. He recommended separating people to prevent infections. Scientists tested it using glass plates and came up with a distance of 6 feet.
In the 1930s, another scientist, William F. Wells, figured out that although some droplets that come from the mouth or nose are large and fall to the ground quickly -- within 3 to 6 feet -- sick people can also emit smaller virus-filled aerosols that float in the air for minutes or even hours. Those can also be infectious.
Evidence of airborne spread
Since March 2020, when 52 members of a choir in Skagit County, Washington, got Covid-19 after attending practice with just one person who was sick, health officials have known that the virus that causes Covid-19 can be transmitted by smaller aerosols, making distance less important than ventilation and time.
Yet the CDC continues to factor 6 feet into its risk equations.
In response to a question from CNN, a CDC spokesperson said Thursday that the agency was not planning to change the close contact definition "at this time."
FDA vaccine advisers say a plan for updating Covid-19 shots is needed
"If you were part of an event where there's multiple infections, you will have been exposed. I don't care if it's 6 feet or 15," said Dr. Carlos Del Rio, an infectious disease specialist at Emory University.
If you're exposed but up to date on your vaccinations, Del Rio said, you should watch for symptoms and wear a mask for 10 days, which is what the CDC says, too.
"If I was in that room with Pelosi and others where they got infected, I would consider myself a close contact because I was there," he said. It's not known exactly where Pelosi was infected, but she was among lawmakers who appeared maskless with President Biden at a signing ceremony on Wednesday. According to CDC guidelines, Pelosi was not considered to be a close contact of the President, the White House said in a statement.
That's closer to the way some other countries have defined exposure.
Until February, when the UK began to roll back its pandemic restrictions, health authorities there defined a close contact more broadly. Their definition included anyone who:
- Lives with someone who tests positive
- Has face-to-face contact or a conversation within about 3 feet of someone who has tested positive
- Has been within 3 feet for 1 minute or longer, regardless of whether the contact was face-to-face
- Has spent more than 15 minutes within 6 feet of someone who tested positive
- Has traveled in the same vehicle or plane with a positive case
Linsey Marr, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech University who studies aerosols, said the CDC needs to take another look at its contact precautions.
"I do think they should update it, because I think it's based on outdated thinking about transmission," she said.
Get CNN Health's weekly newsletter
Sign up here to get The Results Are In with Dr. Sanjay Gupta every Tuesday from the CNN Health team.
Marr said the CDC probably made the cutoffs of 6 feet and 15 minutes to try to make the best use of limited public health resources such as contract tracing.
"It's based more on convenience than on science at this point," she said.
Marr said that all superspreading events have four things in common: lots of talking, shouting or singing; long exposure times; poor ventilation; and no masks.
"If you have that type of situation, then I would say everyone in the room is potentially exposed," she said.
In Washington's Covid-19 outbreak, new variants flout old 'close contact' rule
Washington is coping with a rash of high-profile Covid-19 cases after a series of public events have exposed high-level officials.
www.cnn.com
Okay I haven’t said this in a month but people stay away from large groups of white people especially if you are not vaccinatedIn Washington's Covid-19 outbreak, new variants flout old 'close contact' rule
By Brenda Goodman, CNN
Updated 3:33 PM ET, Fri April 8, 2022
(CNN)Washington, DC is coping with a cluster of high-profile Covid-19 cases after a series of public events exposed high-level officials.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Sens. Susan Collins and Raphael Warnock, and Rep. Peter DeFazio have all this week announced that they tested positive.
Health experts say the outbreak may be rooted, in part, in outdated and confusing guidelines from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that help people assess their risk of getting the virus that causes Covid-19 or passing it on to others.
Should you get your second booster shot now?
On Thursday, after announcing that she had been in close contact with someone who had tested positive for Covid-19, Vice President Kamala Harris presided over the Senate confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson without wearing a mask, though CDC guidelines advise masking around other people for at least 10 days after exposure to the virus.
The same day, at a press event for World Health Day, Xavier Becerra, secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, explained that he and World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreysesus would both be wearing masks at the event -- except while speaking -- "because each of us has been close to someone who tested positive recently."
Health experts said Friday that Americans are relying on CDC guidance that's overdue for an update.
Origins of the 6-foot rule
Since the early days of the pandemic, the CDC has defined someone who's a "close contact" -- and is therefore at risk of contracting and spreading the virus -- as someone who has spent a cumulative total of at least 15 minutes within 6 feet of another person who has lab-confirmed Covid-19 or who's been told they have Covid-19 by a doctor.
BA.2, where are you? Dominant strain hasn't shown signs of starting a surge
With newer, more contagious variants such as BA.2 on the loose, Kimberly Prather, an aerosol scientist at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, said the rule needs rethinking.
"Fifteen minutes and 6 feet was not really useful in the first place," she said. "We know people get infected in less time and longer distanced."
Prather thinks the rule for close contact should have been based on anyone sharing the air in a room for a certain number of minutes.
Distance, specifically the distance of 6 feet, has been in the infection equation since in the late 1800s, when a scientist named Carl Flugge figured out that infections could be transmitted by respiratory droplets through the air. He recommended separating people to prevent infections. Scientists tested it using glass plates and came up with a distance of 6 feet.
In the 1930s, another scientist, William F. Wells, figured out that although some droplets that come from the mouth or nose are large and fall to the ground quickly -- within 3 to 6 feet -- sick people can also emit smaller virus-filled aerosols that float in the air for minutes or even hours. Those can also be infectious.
Evidence of airborne spread
Since March 2020, when 52 members of a choir in Skagit County, Washington, got Covid-19 after attending practice with just one person who was sick, health officials have known that the virus that causes Covid-19 can be transmitted by smaller aerosols, making distance less important than ventilation and time.
Yet the CDC continues to factor 6 feet into its risk equations.
In response to a question from CNN, a CDC spokesperson said Thursday that the agency was not planning to change the close contact definition "at this time."
FDA vaccine advisers say a plan for updating Covid-19 shots is needed
"If you were part of an event where there's multiple infections, you will have been exposed. I don't care if it's 6 feet or 15," said Dr. Carlos Del Rio, an infectious disease specialist at Emory University.
If you're exposed but up to date on your vaccinations, Del Rio said, you should watch for symptoms and wear a mask for 10 days, which is what the CDC says, too.
"If I was in that room with Pelosi and others where they got infected, I would consider myself a close contact because I was there," he said. It's not known exactly where Pelosi was infected, but she was among lawmakers who appeared maskless with President Biden at a signing ceremony on Wednesday. According to CDC guidelines, Pelosi was not considered to be a close contact of the President, the White House said in a statement.
That's closer to the way some other countries have defined exposure.
Until February, when the UK began to roll back its pandemic restrictions, health authorities there defined a close contact more broadly. Their definition included anyone who:
More convenience than science
- Lives with someone who tests positive
- Has face-to-face contact or a conversation within about 3 feet of someone who has tested positive
- Has been within 3 feet for 1 minute or longer, regardless of whether the contact was face-to-face
- Has spent more than 15 minutes within 6 feet of someone who tested positive
- Has traveled in the same vehicle or plane with a positive case
Linsey Marr, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech University who studies aerosols, said the CDC needs to take another look at its contact precautions.
"I do think they should update it, because I think it's based on outdated thinking about transmission," she said.
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Marr said the CDC probably made the cutoffs of 6 feet and 15 minutes to try to make the best use of limited public health resources such as contract tracing.
"It's based more on convenience than on science at this point," she said.
Marr said that all superspreading events have four things in common: lots of talking, shouting or singing; long exposure times; poor ventilation; and no masks.
"If you have that type of situation, then I would say everyone in the room is potentially exposed," she said.
In Washington's Covid-19 outbreak, new variants flout old 'close contact' rule
Washington is coping with a rash of high-profile Covid-19 cases after a series of public events have exposed high-level officials.
shit is real fam....my son caught it last week and had to quarantine in college for 5 days initially then another 2 days til his tests came back negative. Looks to be Omicron. He was vaccinated and boosted and only had sore throat, running nose and terrible congestion...kept his butt out of the hospital but he's glad he got vax and boosted too. Shit is real tho...keep those masks on fam...do the smart thing and keep your immune systems up and strong as you can. Shit is real. take care!
Prayers go out to your son great news
This powerful Covid-19 mitigation measure is invisible
With mask mandates virtually gone and vaccinaton rates at a standstill, there's one mitigation measure that can still make a big difference: ventilation.
Airflow gon' make me a rich mane!!! @killagram
Thank you...'preciate it fam!
@easy_b
sports.yahoo.com
Adams Enjoys Unmasked Weekend Before COVID Diagnosis | NYC Top Stories
Magician Runs 116 Miles Central Park | Queens Drag Racer Flees Cops | NYC COVID Cases Triple | Heiress Sues Over $15M Penthouse's Leaks
sports.yahoo.com
Biden administration extends transportation mask mandate for 15 more days
The U.S. has repeatedly extended the mask mandate during the pandemic.
You're right about that. Just yesterday the Feds arrested and charged the Lt. Governor of New York with campaign finance issues. Meanwhile trump is admitting to his crimes and Merrick Garland is sitting on his ass because "the optics don't look good to charge a former president". The democrats are always scared to fight back.
Two New Omicron Subvariants, BA.2.12 & BA.2.12.1, Are Fueling Rising Covid Cases In New York
BA.2.12 and BA.2.12.1 are thought to be 25% more transmissible than BA.2, which itself is 30% more transmissible than the original Omicron
deadline.com
@easy_b
MAGA doctor claims COVID-19 vaccines are part of Catholic plot to turn you into a 'hybrid of Satan'
I don’t know about you, but nothing in my life ever made sense until today, when I discovered the COVID-19 pandemic was a Catholic plot to insert serpent DNA into my genome via mRNA technology so I’d slowly metamorphose into a liberal hybrid of Satan....
www.dailykos.com
And this is why a lot of CAC’s died last yearMAGA doctor claims COVID-19 vaccines are part of Catholic plot to turn you into a 'hybrid of Satan'
I don’t know about you, but nothing in my life ever made sense until today, when I discovered the COVID-19 pandemic was a Catholic plot to insert serpent DNA into my genome via mRNA technology so I’d slowly metamorphose into a liberal hybrid of Satan....www.dailykos.com
The Final Pandemic Betrayal
Millions of people are still mourning loved ones lost to COVID, their grief intensified, prolonged, and even denied by the politics of the pandemic.
Millions of people are still mourning loved ones lost to COVID, their grief intensified, prolonged, and even denied by the politics of the pandemic.
Lucy Esparza-Casarez thinks she caught the coronavirus while working the polls during California’s 2020 primary election, before bringing it home to her husband, David, her sister-in-law Yolanda, and her mother-in-law, Balvina. Though Lucy herself developed what she calls “the worst flu times 100,” David fared worse. Lucy took him to the hospital on March 20, the last time she saw him in the flesh. He died on April 3, nine days before their wedding anniversary, at the age of 69. Lucy said goodbye over Skype. During that time, Yolanda fell ill too; after two months in the hospital, she died on June 1. Balvina, meanwhile, recovered from her bout with COVID-19, but, distraught after losing two children in as many months, she died on June 16. Lucy found herself alone in her home for the first time in 23 years. Because the hospital never returned David’s belongings, she didn’t even have his wedding ring.
Lucy had coped with the losses of her father, sister, and mother in the two decades before the pandemic. But she told me that what she feels now is fundamentally different. She never got to comfort David before he died, never got to mourn him in the company of friends, and never escaped the constant reminders of the disease that killed him. Every news story twisted the knife. Every surge salted the wound. Two years later, she is still inundated by her grief. “And now people are saying we can get back to normal,” she told me. “What’s normal?”
The number of people who have died of COVID-19 in the United States has always been undercounted because such counts rely on often-inaccurate death certificates. But the total, as the CDC and other official sources suggest, will soon surpass 1 million. That number—the sum of a million individual tragedies—is almost too large to grasp, and only a few professions have borne visceral witness to the pandemic’s immense scale. Alanna Badgley has been an EMT since 2010, “and the number of people I’ve pronounced dead in the last two years has eclipsed that of the first 10,” she told me. Hari Close, a funeral director in Baltimore, told me that he cared for families who “were burying three or four people weeks apart.” Maureen O’Donnell, an obituary writer at the Chicago Sun-Times, told me that she usually writes “about people who had a beautiful arc to their life,” but during the pandemic, she has found herself writing about lives that were “cut short, like trees being cut down.” On average, each person who has died of COVID has done so roughly a decade before their time.
In just two years, COVID has become the third most common cause of death in the U.S., which means that it is also the third leading cause of grief in the U.S. Each American who has died of COVID has left an average of nine close relatives bereaved, creating a community of grievers larger than the population of all but 11 states. Under normal circumstances, 10 percent of bereaved people would be expected to develop prolonged grief, which is unusually intense, incapacitating, and persistent. But for COVID grievers, that proportion may be even higher, because the pandemic has ticked off many risk factors.
Deaths from COVID have been unexpected, untimely, particularly painful, and, in many cases, preventable. The pandemic has replaced community with isolation, empathy with judgment, and opportunities for healing with relentless triggers. Some of these features accompany other causes of death, but COVID has woven them together and inflicted them at scale. In 1 million instants, the disease has torn wounds in 9 million worlds, while creating the perfect conditions for those wounds to fester. It has opened up private grief to public scrutiny, all while depriving grievers of the collective support they need to recover. The U.S. seems intent on brushing aside its losses in its desire to move past the crisis. But the grief of millions of people is not going away. “There’s no end to the grief,” Lucy Esparza-Casarez told me. “It changes. It morphs into something different. But it’s ongoing.”
By upending the entire world, COVID could have created a shared experience that countered the loneliness of grief. But most of the people I’ve been speaking with feel profoundly lonely—detached from society, from their support network, and especially from their loved ones at the moment of their death.
Sabila Khan’s dad, Shafqat, had an aggressive form of Parkinson’s disease, and she knew their time together was limited. “But every time I imagined him dying, I imagined us being with him,” she told me. In her mind, the family would encircle his bed, filling his final moments with tributes of love and gratitude. Instead, none of them saw him for a full month before his death. The rehab facility where he was temporarily staying closed its doors to visitors in March 2020. The family kept in touch with him through daily calls, but after COVID hit the facility and took Shafqat’s voice, he stopped answering. On April 6, he was rushed to a hospital just three blocks away from the family’s house, but when he died 8 days later, “he might as well have been on a different planet,” Sabila told me.
Most of the grievers I interviewed had similar experiences, especially during the early pandemic. From the last time they saw their loved one in person to the moment they said goodbye on a grainy screen, their separation was absolute. They weren’t allowed to visit. Communication was impossible once ventilators became necessary. Updates were scarce because hospitals were overwhelmed. There was just the waiting. Some waited while fighting for their own life. Teresita Horne had spent more than a week on a breathing machine when her 13-year-old son, Donovan, died in a different hospital; she watched him die on her phone. “I remember screaming,” she told me. “When your kids are sick, they need you, but I couldn’t be there to comfort him. I couldn’t hold his hand one last time.”
These experiences share qualities with other devastating crises. Sarah Wagner, an anthropologist at George Washington University who researches death and mourning, sees similarities between the experiences of COVID grievers and people whose loved ones went missing during wars. “Families didn’t know what happened and are left to imagine those horrible last moments” in a way that “still troubles their grief years later,” she told me. Sabila Khan, for example, knows little about her father’s final days, except that he likely spent them “in a warzone of an ER,” she told me. “What was he thinking? How do I even come to terms with that?” Many grievers know that dying from COVID is long and grueling. Sherry Congrave Wilson was tearful but unflinching when she told me that Felicia Ledon Crow, her best friend of 30 years, died suffering and alone. “I just hope and pray that she had a loving nurse, someone around who was kind to her,” Congrave Wilson said.
The aftermath of a COVID death is lonely too. Social rituals can help people cope with guilt and uncertainty, but during much of the pandemic, funerals, wakes, and shivas haven’t happened. Kristin Urquiza, a co-founder of the nonprofit Marked by COVID, lost her father in June 2020; aside from a bizarre virtual funeral where the connection kept glitching, she still hasn’t been able to mourn and celebrate him with the hundreds of people who loved him. And without outlets for collective expression, grief can stew. Hari Close, the funeral director, told me that some people felt they had failed their loved ones twice over, first by not being with them at the end and again by not being able to celebrate their life.
After death, routine and social connection can help mourners cope. But grievers have been deprived of both because of America’s continued failure to control the pandemic. “In addition to mourning my dad, there was that extra layer of mourning my life,” Sabila said. Several people told me that friends or family members who once would have been supportive pillars became distant or unhelpful, either because they began to swallow pandemic misinformation or because they were simply exhausted. When Rekha, a family friend of mine who lives in Seattle, lost her dad in 2013, “everyone I knew showed up and took care of me,” she told me. That didn’t happen when her mother died of COVID this January because “everyone’s depleted,” she said. (The Atlantic is identifying Rekha by only her first name to protect her extended family’s desire for privacy.)
Shafqat Khan loved activism, sports, and books—American, British, South Asian classics and serials, and, “when he was especially desperate,” his daughter Sabila’s young-adult novels, she said.
While support has vanished, reminders of loss have proliferated. Many people have found themselves isolating in now-emptier homes. The phones on which they watched their loved ones die sit in their hands every day. The disease that has caused them so much pain has been perpetually on the news and on people’s lips—a miasma of triggers that has kept their grief raw. “To have to confront on an almost hourly basis everyone’s feelings about this situation that we’re in made it so much worse,” Kristin Urquiza told me.
Many of the people I interviewed felt that their loved ones immediately became statistics—that their individual tragedy was subsumed by the pandemic’s enormity, and that people were constantly discussing every aspect of the crisis except for grief. “In American culture, grief is already a very isolating experience, but it has been even more isolating this time around—which is weird because we’re all supposed to be in this collective experience together,” Rekha said. The pandemic’s circumstances have left her and millions of others in an almost paradoxical state of mass isolation. They’ve all shared in the same tragedy but feel so very alone.
When COVID grievers tell others about their loss, they tend to get the same responses. Do you know how they were exposed? Did they have a preexisting condition? Were they vaccinated? Every griever I interviewed has faced these questions, from online trolls and close friends alike, and with shocking immediacy. People regularly ask Rekha if her dead mother was vaccinated before they offer condolences or sympathies. “It’s not just one time; it’s all the time,” she said. “It’s all the time,” Kristin Urquiza echoed. “Pretty much from every person,” says Christina Faria, who lost her mother, Viola, late last year.
In 1989, the grief expert Kenneth Doka coined the term disenfranchised grief to describe situations where people struggle to cope with losses that aren’t “socially sanctioned, openly acknowledged, or publicly mourned.” That’s exactly what many Americans who have lost someone to COVID are experiencing. The words we normally use to console grievers honor the relationships that death disrupts: I’m sorry for your loss. But the questions that COVID grievers get “reduce the person to the disease,” Rebecca Morse, who studies death and loss at Divine Mercy University and is a former president of the Association for Death Education and Counseling, told me. And they cast judgment upon the circumstances around their infection, “which makes these deaths stigmatized and shameful,” Morse said. If the deceased was unvaccinated, went to a bar, or had preexisting health problems, their life becomes devalued, and their death becomes less tragic. When hearing about Viola’s death, “everyone is like, ‘Oh, she was 76’ or ‘She had heart surgery’ or ‘She was overweight. What did you expect? Of course she was going to be the one to die,’” Christina told me. Especially after vaccines became available, COVID became lumped with causes of death such as lung cancer, liver disease, and AIDS, which society classifies as self-inflicted and therefore worthy of blame rather than sympathy. Instead of getting support, many COVID grievers have been forced to defend their loved ones and justify their grief.
“Everyone is having a fear response,” Rekha told me. They’re grasping for signs that their choices, or their lack of preexisting conditions, make them safe. But that instinct easily turns data into stigma. If someone’s death fits with population-wide trends—if they were older, chronically ill, or unvaccinated—their loss is explicable, and therefore dismissible. The compulsion to explain away a death is so strong that although Rekha’s mother was thriving, beyond having high blood pressure, even people who knew her were quick to retrofit poor health onto their memories. They’ll claim she was frail, as if “COVID was the last little bit of her dying anyway,” Rekha told me. “And, like, You were around her, and she was fine!”
At the other extreme, people whose deaths don’t fit with population-wide trends are also dismissed as statistical outliers who inconveniently complicate accepted notions of safety. Teresita Horne keeps hearing that kids aren’t at risk from COVID, even though she knows many parents who have lost children of Donovan’s age. “You don’t hear about them,” she told me. The odds that a child will die of COVID are incredibly low, but if your child is part of the numerator, it doesn’t matter how large the denominator is. Similarly, vaccines are extremely effective at preventing COVID deaths—but some vaccinated people still die, Christina’s mother among them. “Everyone assumes she wasn’t vaccinated,” she told me. “They want to believe that people didn’t do all the things they needed to do to be safe—and that’s not true for a lot of people.” When Cleavon Gilman, an ER doctor, honors such folks on Twitter, he gets accused of undermining confidence in vaccines, or even being an anti-vaxxer. “It’s gotten to the point where if someone was vaccinated and died from COVID, people think you shouldn’t talk about it,” he told me.
Grievers must also deal with lies and mocking. On the day that Esparza-Casarez’s husband died in April 2020, she watched a press conference in which Donald Trump stated that the virus “is going away.” Zach, an artist who lives in St. Louis, saw a clip of Ted Cruz mocking masks at the Conservative Political Action Conference while his father lay dying in a hospital. (The Atlantic has agreed to identify him by only his first name to avoid heightening tensions in his family that have already been exacerbated by the pandemic.) “It was just a punch in the gut … the mania, the cheering, the applause,” he told me. “Imagine if you lost someone to cancer and half the country was making fun of cancer all the time,” he said. “Imagine that it’s just everywhere, every day, and it doesn’t go away.”
These dynamics have silenced many grievers, deepening their already intense isolation. Martha Greenwald, a writer in Kentucky, runs a site called Who We Lost where people can post stories of their loved ones; many do so because the site doesn’t allow comments, making it a rare space where they can share their grief without risking judgment.
Sympathy is even scarcer for people whose loved ones bought into COVID disinformation. Kristin Urquiza’s father, Mark, took COVID seriously at first but let his guard down in May 2020. Trump had said it was time to reopen society, Arizona Governor Doug Ducey lifted restrictions, and Mark, a lifelong Republican, said, “Why would they say it’s safe if it’s not safe?” Kristin recalled. “That’s when I lost the battle with my dad.” Later, after he caught COVID, most likely at a bar, and before he went into the hospital for the last time, she asked him if he felt betrayed. “My dad never, ever hesitated with his words, but there was just this long pause, and he quietly said yes,” she told me. People have told her that Mark deserved what he got. But Kristin sees him as yet another victim of the disinformation that ran rampant among his social circles, his media universe, and the elected leaders he trusted. “That shouldn’t result in a death sentence,” she said.
For more than two years, COVID has tested America’s institutions—its political apparatus, its information networks, its public-health system, its hospitals—and found them all wanting. Several grievers told me stories in which many failing systems crashed down upon their loved ones. A refugee with a family to feed isn’t eligible for financial assistance and so carries on working at an oil change station throughout a COVID surge, and gets infected. Local hospitals are overwhelmed, so a mother moves in with her daughter elsewhere in the country and catches COVID from her grandkids. An immunosuppressed organ-transplant recipient dies of COVID after their child brings it home from school. The employees at a doctor’s office don’t learn that they’re COVID-positive for days, because the holidays have created a backlog of tests, so a mother who turns up for an appointment in the intervening time gets COVID from them.
These complicated chains of events mean that “if you lost someone to COVID, you don’t even know where to begin to find accountability,” Alex Goldstein, who runs a memorial Twitter account called @FacesofCovid, told me. Do you blame Trump or Joe Biden? Your governor or your mayor? The person who infected your loved one or the person who infected that person? Those who sow misinformation or those who buy into it? The entire world? “Blame has been placed all over, and responsibility is so diffuse,” Wagner, the anthropologist at George Washington University, told me. “It’s harder to create clear narratives,” which makes the tragedy feel that much more senseless.
Many grievers end up blaming themselves. Should I have pulled them out of that nursing home? Should I have pushed them harder to get vaccinated? And worst of all: Did I give them COVID? “There are so many little pivot points where things could have gone a different way,” Rebecca Morse, the death-and-loss expert, told me. “Imagining what could or should have been done can increase both your anger and your guilt.” Rekha told me that her anger comes in waves, “and I don’t even know what to be angry at,” she said. “I feel like we’re all culpable to different degrees.”
Many grievers are finding the current phase of the pandemic especially hard. For the families of the first 100,000 Americans to die of COVID, “there was at least a sense that the world had stopped,” Sabila Khan told me. Now, grieving families are told that we must learn to live with the virus that only just tore a hole in their lives. Jeannina Smith, a doctor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, cares for organ-transplant recipients, who are on immunosuppressive drugs and are therefore particularly vulnerable to disease; she told me that she lost more patients in the Omicron surge than at any previous point in the pandemic. “They did everything right—they got vaccinated and boosted and were so careful,” Smith said, and their loved ones must now mourn them “while society is saying that COVID is over.”
After Christina Faria’s mother died on December 29, 2021, her friends said it was a harsh reminder that the pandemic wasn’t over. “But here we are, not even three months later, and no one talks about her anymore,” Christina told me in March. She has several disabilities that make her vulnerable to respiratory infections, and Viola was her primary caregiver; she’s now struggling to pay her bills, keep her home, and protect her health. And yet, she told me, her friends are getting annoyed that she still wants to wear a mask when she isn’t required to.
Many grievers are starved for sympathy and patience because our popular understanding of grief is wrong. An influential but misleading model suggests that it progresses through five stages—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. But in fact, it doesn’t involve discrete stages, doesn’t proceed along a predictable linear path, and might not end in acceptance. “Closure” is a simplistic myth. Grief, as it actually unfolds, is erratic, and in many cases slow. Rekha remembers feeling pressured to move past her dad’s death in 2013; she now feels an extreme version of the same compulsion, as if society is insisting that this is the moment for everyone to move past their pandemic grief together. In mid-March, after an especially tough week, she told her husband that she didn’t know why she was having a bad flare-up of grief. He reminded her that her mother died a month ago. “I had internalized this feeling that it’s time to be done with it,” she said, “and I have to remind myself that it just happened.”
Even people who lost their loved ones at the start of the pandemic are still hurting. “Time itself heals nothing,” Morse told me. Time simply gives people chances to learn ways of coping. But those chances have been stripped away by two years of social isolation and upended daily routines. And “without grappling with the daily reality of the loss, the mind doesn’t fully process what happened,” Natalia Skritskaya, an expert in prolonged grief at Columbia University, told me.
Instead, many people “created a time capsule,” Morse said, locking their grief away without ever learning how to live with it. When society reopens, the capsule does too, and the grievers reemerge, still raging and sorrowful while everyone else has moved on. “You’re repeating the same parts of grief all over again and not able to get past it,” Keyerra Snype, a health-care worker, told me. She lost her grandmother Shirley during the first COVID surge, and more than two years later, “it’s difficult all over again,” she said.
Others are trapped in a pandemic time capsule, too, including those whom we rely on to witness death, prevent it, or deal with its aftermath. Hari Close, the funeral director, told me that “even though people think we are used to death, it’s been overwhelming trying to comfort families in their loss,” especially while losing family members and colleagues himself. Cleavon Gilman, the ER doctor, told me that many health-care workers are traumatized after two years of repeatedly telling families that their loved one has died, “hearing that shrill cry on the phone over and over, and then going outside to see a world that’s acting like we’re lying about the numbers.” (Gilman also lost three colleagues to the pandemic: two nurses who died of COVID and a mentor who died of suicide after witnessing the first surge.) Alanna Badgley, the EMT, felt like something broke after Omicron arrived. In February, “at one point, I just started crying and couldn’t stop,” she told me. “I’m just so sad, and I don’t know how to feel better. It’s not like depression. It feels like grief.”
Some of the grievers I talked with feel kinship with COVID long-haulers, whose lives have been flattened by months or years of relentless symptoms and who similarly feel dismissed, ignored, and isolated. They didn’t die of COVID, but many nonetheless lost much of their former life. After getting infected in October 2020, Alexis Misko can no longer muster enough energy to stand for more than 10 minutes or sit upright for more than an hour. She was once an occupational therapist and an avid hiker, and “I grieve constantly for that person,” she wrote in 2021. Nick Güthe told me that after getting long COVID, his wife, Heidi Ferrer, went from being “one of the healthiest people I knew” to living with extreme fatigue and excruciating pain. “In the last weeks of her life, she couldn’t walk, eat most foods she enjoyed, or read a book,” Nick said. “It felt like bees were stinging her ankles all day long.” Heidi died of suicide last May. The doctor who treated her at the hospital and confirmed her death to Nick had never heard of long COVID.
In her book The Myth of Closure, Pauline Boss, a therapist and pioneer in the study of ambiguous loss, offers some advice for pandemic grievers: “It is not closure you need but certainty that your loved one is gone, that they understood why you could not be there to comfort them, that they loved you and forgave you in their last moments of life,” she wrote. Instead of waiting for a clean but mythical endpoint to one’s loss, it is better to search for “meaning and purpose in our lives after this horrific time in history,” she said.
Nick Güthe now pours his energy into raising awareness of long COVID, in part to honor one of Heidi’s last requests to him. “I’ve had to talk a lot of people with long COVID off the same ledge that my wife was on, and it’s been hard to turn away from that,” he said. “I’ve saved quite a few people at this point.” Alex Goldstein also feels compelled to continue posting tributes to the deceased on his @FacesofCOVID account, because it’s all the recognition that some grievers get. “A lot of folks tell me that when it’s late at night and they’re thinking about their loved one, they’ll go to the tweet and look at replies from strangers around the world,” he told me. Four days after her dad died, Sabila Khan started a Facebook group for COVID grievers, which now has 14,000 members. Shafqat was an activist who spent years advocating for Pakistani immigrants, and “this has become a way for me to keep his memory and good work alive,” Sabila told me. “It gives me purpose in my grief.”
In contrast to these grassroots efforts, national moments of mourning and remembrance have been rare and fleeting. A few art projects have powerfully commemorated the losses, but briefly. After collective tragedies, “the rites and rituals of mourning are meant to bring groups back together,” Wagner, the anthropologist, told me. “We’re seeing a process that’s almost antithetical to that, because mourning has been so fragmented and suspended.” Sabila told me that even as a Muslim, she felt more solidarity among fellow Americans after 9/11 than over the past two years. “We didn’t have that rallying moment with COVID,” she told me.
Some of the people I interviewed felt relieved when Biden presided over a lighting ceremony in February 2021, when the COVID death toll was just half what it currently is. But Kristin Urquiza told me that such gestures are “insignificant in comparison to the massive amount of death and suffering that we’ve had.” The nonprofit that she co-founded, Marked by COVID, is pushing the U.S. toward actions more fitting in scale. It wants the first Monday of March to be marked as a national COVID Memorial Day, and for permanent memorials to be erected around the country. “Putting my grief into a physical thing would take off some of the emotional heaviness,” Keyerra Snype told me. And having a solid, lasting memorial would go some way to assuring grievers that their loss is real, and that their loved ones mattered. Urquiza said that she’s striving for the country not just to remember her dad but to remember everything that cost him his life. “We can’t just put this in a memory hole, or we’ll forget,” she said. “I don’t want anyone to ever feel what I’ve had to feel.”
Wagner has seen similar dynamics after past atrocities, in which bereaved family members found themselves having to fight for recognition and reconciliation. “Why on earth should someone who lost multiple members of their family not be allowed to be with their grief, instead of bearing the responsibility for repairing society?” she said. “When it isn’t politically expedient for those in positions of power to commemorate the deaths and extend forms of reparation, it falls on the families.”
If there’s one thing Teresita Horne wants the world to know about Donovan, it’s that “he was one of the kindest souls anyone would have met,” she told me. Kindness is also the thing she most wants from everyone else, no matter their politics or their positions on the pandemic’s numerous controversies. One million people died in just over two years. It should be incontestable that they are gone, that they mattered, and that the millions more who loved them should get the grace and space to grieve and mourn.
All portraits featured here are courtesy of family and friends of the people pictured.
Lucy had coped with the losses of her father, sister, and mother in the two decades before the pandemic. But she told me that what she feels now is fundamentally different. She never got to comfort David before he died, never got to mourn him in the company of friends, and never escaped the constant reminders of the disease that killed him. Every news story twisted the knife. Every surge salted the wound. Two years later, she is still inundated by her grief. “And now people are saying we can get back to normal,” she told me. “What’s normal?”
The number of people who have died of COVID-19 in the United States has always been undercounted because such counts rely on often-inaccurate death certificates. But the total, as the CDC and other official sources suggest, will soon surpass 1 million. That number—the sum of a million individual tragedies—is almost too large to grasp, and only a few professions have borne visceral witness to the pandemic’s immense scale. Alanna Badgley has been an EMT since 2010, “and the number of people I’ve pronounced dead in the last two years has eclipsed that of the first 10,” she told me. Hari Close, a funeral director in Baltimore, told me that he cared for families who “were burying three or four people weeks apart.” Maureen O’Donnell, an obituary writer at the Chicago Sun-Times, told me that she usually writes “about people who had a beautiful arc to their life,” but during the pandemic, she has found herself writing about lives that were “cut short, like trees being cut down.” On average, each person who has died of COVID has done so roughly a decade before their time.
In just two years, COVID has become the third most common cause of death in the U.S., which means that it is also the third leading cause of grief in the U.S. Each American who has died of COVID has left an average of nine close relatives bereaved, creating a community of grievers larger than the population of all but 11 states. Under normal circumstances, 10 percent of bereaved people would be expected to develop prolonged grief, which is unusually intense, incapacitating, and persistent. But for COVID grievers, that proportion may be even higher, because the pandemic has ticked off many risk factors.
Deaths from COVID have been unexpected, untimely, particularly painful, and, in many cases, preventable. The pandemic has replaced community with isolation, empathy with judgment, and opportunities for healing with relentless triggers. Some of these features accompany other causes of death, but COVID has woven them together and inflicted them at scale. In 1 million instants, the disease has torn wounds in 9 million worlds, while creating the perfect conditions for those wounds to fester. It has opened up private grief to public scrutiny, all while depriving grievers of the collective support they need to recover. The U.S. seems intent on brushing aside its losses in its desire to move past the crisis. But the grief of millions of people is not going away. “There’s no end to the grief,” Lucy Esparza-Casarez told me. “It changes. It morphs into something different. But it’s ongoing.”
By upending the entire world, COVID could have created a shared experience that countered the loneliness of grief. But most of the people I’ve been speaking with feel profoundly lonely—detached from society, from their support network, and especially from their loved ones at the moment of their death.
Sabila Khan’s dad, Shafqat, had an aggressive form of Parkinson’s disease, and she knew their time together was limited. “But every time I imagined him dying, I imagined us being with him,” she told me. In her mind, the family would encircle his bed, filling his final moments with tributes of love and gratitude. Instead, none of them saw him for a full month before his death. The rehab facility where he was temporarily staying closed its doors to visitors in March 2020. The family kept in touch with him through daily calls, but after COVID hit the facility and took Shafqat’s voice, he stopped answering. On April 6, he was rushed to a hospital just three blocks away from the family’s house, but when he died 8 days later, “he might as well have been on a different planet,” Sabila told me.
Most of the grievers I interviewed had similar experiences, especially during the early pandemic. From the last time they saw their loved one in person to the moment they said goodbye on a grainy screen, their separation was absolute. They weren’t allowed to visit. Communication was impossible once ventilators became necessary. Updates were scarce because hospitals were overwhelmed. There was just the waiting. Some waited while fighting for their own life. Teresita Horne had spent more than a week on a breathing machine when her 13-year-old son, Donovan, died in a different hospital; she watched him die on her phone. “I remember screaming,” she told me. “When your kids are sick, they need you, but I couldn’t be there to comfort him. I couldn’t hold his hand one last time.”
These experiences share qualities with other devastating crises. Sarah Wagner, an anthropologist at George Washington University who researches death and mourning, sees similarities between the experiences of COVID grievers and people whose loved ones went missing during wars. “Families didn’t know what happened and are left to imagine those horrible last moments” in a way that “still troubles their grief years later,” she told me. Sabila Khan, for example, knows little about her father’s final days, except that he likely spent them “in a warzone of an ER,” she told me. “What was he thinking? How do I even come to terms with that?” Many grievers know that dying from COVID is long and grueling. Sherry Congrave Wilson was tearful but unflinching when she told me that Felicia Ledon Crow, her best friend of 30 years, died suffering and alone. “I just hope and pray that she had a loving nurse, someone around who was kind to her,” Congrave Wilson said.
The aftermath of a COVID death is lonely too. Social rituals can help people cope with guilt and uncertainty, but during much of the pandemic, funerals, wakes, and shivas haven’t happened. Kristin Urquiza, a co-founder of the nonprofit Marked by COVID, lost her father in June 2020; aside from a bizarre virtual funeral where the connection kept glitching, she still hasn’t been able to mourn and celebrate him with the hundreds of people who loved him. And without outlets for collective expression, grief can stew. Hari Close, the funeral director, told me that some people felt they had failed their loved ones twice over, first by not being with them at the end and again by not being able to celebrate their life.
After death, routine and social connection can help mourners cope. But grievers have been deprived of both because of America’s continued failure to control the pandemic. “In addition to mourning my dad, there was that extra layer of mourning my life,” Sabila said. Several people told me that friends or family members who once would have been supportive pillars became distant or unhelpful, either because they began to swallow pandemic misinformation or because they were simply exhausted. When Rekha, a family friend of mine who lives in Seattle, lost her dad in 2013, “everyone I knew showed up and took care of me,” she told me. That didn’t happen when her mother died of COVID this January because “everyone’s depleted,” she said. (The Atlantic is identifying Rekha by only her first name to protect her extended family’s desire for privacy.)
Shafqat Khan loved activism, sports, and books—American, British, South Asian classics and serials, and, “when he was especially desperate,” his daughter Sabila’s young-adult novels, she said.
While support has vanished, reminders of loss have proliferated. Many people have found themselves isolating in now-emptier homes. The phones on which they watched their loved ones die sit in their hands every day. The disease that has caused them so much pain has been perpetually on the news and on people’s lips—a miasma of triggers that has kept their grief raw. “To have to confront on an almost hourly basis everyone’s feelings about this situation that we’re in made it so much worse,” Kristin Urquiza told me.
Many of the people I interviewed felt that their loved ones immediately became statistics—that their individual tragedy was subsumed by the pandemic’s enormity, and that people were constantly discussing every aspect of the crisis except for grief. “In American culture, grief is already a very isolating experience, but it has been even more isolating this time around—which is weird because we’re all supposed to be in this collective experience together,” Rekha said. The pandemic’s circumstances have left her and millions of others in an almost paradoxical state of mass isolation. They’ve all shared in the same tragedy but feel so very alone.
When COVID grievers tell others about their loss, they tend to get the same responses. Do you know how they were exposed? Did they have a preexisting condition? Were they vaccinated? Every griever I interviewed has faced these questions, from online trolls and close friends alike, and with shocking immediacy. People regularly ask Rekha if her dead mother was vaccinated before they offer condolences or sympathies. “It’s not just one time; it’s all the time,” she said. “It’s all the time,” Kristin Urquiza echoed. “Pretty much from every person,” says Christina Faria, who lost her mother, Viola, late last year.
In 1989, the grief expert Kenneth Doka coined the term disenfranchised grief to describe situations where people struggle to cope with losses that aren’t “socially sanctioned, openly acknowledged, or publicly mourned.” That’s exactly what many Americans who have lost someone to COVID are experiencing. The words we normally use to console grievers honor the relationships that death disrupts: I’m sorry for your loss. But the questions that COVID grievers get “reduce the person to the disease,” Rebecca Morse, who studies death and loss at Divine Mercy University and is a former president of the Association for Death Education and Counseling, told me. And they cast judgment upon the circumstances around their infection, “which makes these deaths stigmatized and shameful,” Morse said. If the deceased was unvaccinated, went to a bar, or had preexisting health problems, their life becomes devalued, and their death becomes less tragic. When hearing about Viola’s death, “everyone is like, ‘Oh, she was 76’ or ‘She had heart surgery’ or ‘She was overweight. What did you expect? Of course she was going to be the one to die,’” Christina told me. Especially after vaccines became available, COVID became lumped with causes of death such as lung cancer, liver disease, and AIDS, which society classifies as self-inflicted and therefore worthy of blame rather than sympathy. Instead of getting support, many COVID grievers have been forced to defend their loved ones and justify their grief.
“Everyone is having a fear response,” Rekha told me. They’re grasping for signs that their choices, or their lack of preexisting conditions, make them safe. But that instinct easily turns data into stigma. If someone’s death fits with population-wide trends—if they were older, chronically ill, or unvaccinated—their loss is explicable, and therefore dismissible. The compulsion to explain away a death is so strong that although Rekha’s mother was thriving, beyond having high blood pressure, even people who knew her were quick to retrofit poor health onto their memories. They’ll claim she was frail, as if “COVID was the last little bit of her dying anyway,” Rekha told me. “And, like, You were around her, and she was fine!”
At the other extreme, people whose deaths don’t fit with population-wide trends are also dismissed as statistical outliers who inconveniently complicate accepted notions of safety. Teresita Horne keeps hearing that kids aren’t at risk from COVID, even though she knows many parents who have lost children of Donovan’s age. “You don’t hear about them,” she told me. The odds that a child will die of COVID are incredibly low, but if your child is part of the numerator, it doesn’t matter how large the denominator is. Similarly, vaccines are extremely effective at preventing COVID deaths—but some vaccinated people still die, Christina’s mother among them. “Everyone assumes she wasn’t vaccinated,” she told me. “They want to believe that people didn’t do all the things they needed to do to be safe—and that’s not true for a lot of people.” When Cleavon Gilman, an ER doctor, honors such folks on Twitter, he gets accused of undermining confidence in vaccines, or even being an anti-vaxxer. “It’s gotten to the point where if someone was vaccinated and died from COVID, people think you shouldn’t talk about it,” he told me.
Grievers must also deal with lies and mocking. On the day that Esparza-Casarez’s husband died in April 2020, she watched a press conference in which Donald Trump stated that the virus “is going away.” Zach, an artist who lives in St. Louis, saw a clip of Ted Cruz mocking masks at the Conservative Political Action Conference while his father lay dying in a hospital. (The Atlantic has agreed to identify him by only his first name to avoid heightening tensions in his family that have already been exacerbated by the pandemic.) “It was just a punch in the gut … the mania, the cheering, the applause,” he told me. “Imagine if you lost someone to cancer and half the country was making fun of cancer all the time,” he said. “Imagine that it’s just everywhere, every day, and it doesn’t go away.”
These dynamics have silenced many grievers, deepening their already intense isolation. Martha Greenwald, a writer in Kentucky, runs a site called Who We Lost where people can post stories of their loved ones; many do so because the site doesn’t allow comments, making it a rare space where they can share their grief without risking judgment.
Sympathy is even scarcer for people whose loved ones bought into COVID disinformation. Kristin Urquiza’s father, Mark, took COVID seriously at first but let his guard down in May 2020. Trump had said it was time to reopen society, Arizona Governor Doug Ducey lifted restrictions, and Mark, a lifelong Republican, said, “Why would they say it’s safe if it’s not safe?” Kristin recalled. “That’s when I lost the battle with my dad.” Later, after he caught COVID, most likely at a bar, and before he went into the hospital for the last time, she asked him if he felt betrayed. “My dad never, ever hesitated with his words, but there was just this long pause, and he quietly said yes,” she told me. People have told her that Mark deserved what he got. But Kristin sees him as yet another victim of the disinformation that ran rampant among his social circles, his media universe, and the elected leaders he trusted. “That shouldn’t result in a death sentence,” she said.
For more than two years, COVID has tested America’s institutions—its political apparatus, its information networks, its public-health system, its hospitals—and found them all wanting. Several grievers told me stories in which many failing systems crashed down upon their loved ones. A refugee with a family to feed isn’t eligible for financial assistance and so carries on working at an oil change station throughout a COVID surge, and gets infected. Local hospitals are overwhelmed, so a mother moves in with her daughter elsewhere in the country and catches COVID from her grandkids. An immunosuppressed organ-transplant recipient dies of COVID after their child brings it home from school. The employees at a doctor’s office don’t learn that they’re COVID-positive for days, because the holidays have created a backlog of tests, so a mother who turns up for an appointment in the intervening time gets COVID from them.
These complicated chains of events mean that “if you lost someone to COVID, you don’t even know where to begin to find accountability,” Alex Goldstein, who runs a memorial Twitter account called @FacesofCovid, told me. Do you blame Trump or Joe Biden? Your governor or your mayor? The person who infected your loved one or the person who infected that person? Those who sow misinformation or those who buy into it? The entire world? “Blame has been placed all over, and responsibility is so diffuse,” Wagner, the anthropologist at George Washington University, told me. “It’s harder to create clear narratives,” which makes the tragedy feel that much more senseless.
Many grievers end up blaming themselves. Should I have pulled them out of that nursing home? Should I have pushed them harder to get vaccinated? And worst of all: Did I give them COVID? “There are so many little pivot points where things could have gone a different way,” Rebecca Morse, the death-and-loss expert, told me. “Imagining what could or should have been done can increase both your anger and your guilt.” Rekha told me that her anger comes in waves, “and I don’t even know what to be angry at,” she said. “I feel like we’re all culpable to different degrees.”
Many grievers are finding the current phase of the pandemic especially hard. For the families of the first 100,000 Americans to die of COVID, “there was at least a sense that the world had stopped,” Sabila Khan told me. Now, grieving families are told that we must learn to live with the virus that only just tore a hole in their lives. Jeannina Smith, a doctor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, cares for organ-transplant recipients, who are on immunosuppressive drugs and are therefore particularly vulnerable to disease; she told me that she lost more patients in the Omicron surge than at any previous point in the pandemic. “They did everything right—they got vaccinated and boosted and were so careful,” Smith said, and their loved ones must now mourn them “while society is saying that COVID is over.”
After Christina Faria’s mother died on December 29, 2021, her friends said it was a harsh reminder that the pandemic wasn’t over. “But here we are, not even three months later, and no one talks about her anymore,” Christina told me in March. She has several disabilities that make her vulnerable to respiratory infections, and Viola was her primary caregiver; she’s now struggling to pay her bills, keep her home, and protect her health. And yet, she told me, her friends are getting annoyed that she still wants to wear a mask when she isn’t required to.
Many grievers are starved for sympathy and patience because our popular understanding of grief is wrong. An influential but misleading model suggests that it progresses through five stages—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. But in fact, it doesn’t involve discrete stages, doesn’t proceed along a predictable linear path, and might not end in acceptance. “Closure” is a simplistic myth. Grief, as it actually unfolds, is erratic, and in many cases slow. Rekha remembers feeling pressured to move past her dad’s death in 2013; she now feels an extreme version of the same compulsion, as if society is insisting that this is the moment for everyone to move past their pandemic grief together. In mid-March, after an especially tough week, she told her husband that she didn’t know why she was having a bad flare-up of grief. He reminded her that her mother died a month ago. “I had internalized this feeling that it’s time to be done with it,” she said, “and I have to remind myself that it just happened.”
Even people who lost their loved ones at the start of the pandemic are still hurting. “Time itself heals nothing,” Morse told me. Time simply gives people chances to learn ways of coping. But those chances have been stripped away by two years of social isolation and upended daily routines. And “without grappling with the daily reality of the loss, the mind doesn’t fully process what happened,” Natalia Skritskaya, an expert in prolonged grief at Columbia University, told me.
Instead, many people “created a time capsule,” Morse said, locking their grief away without ever learning how to live with it. When society reopens, the capsule does too, and the grievers reemerge, still raging and sorrowful while everyone else has moved on. “You’re repeating the same parts of grief all over again and not able to get past it,” Keyerra Snype, a health-care worker, told me. She lost her grandmother Shirley during the first COVID surge, and more than two years later, “it’s difficult all over again,” she said.
Others are trapped in a pandemic time capsule, too, including those whom we rely on to witness death, prevent it, or deal with its aftermath. Hari Close, the funeral director, told me that “even though people think we are used to death, it’s been overwhelming trying to comfort families in their loss,” especially while losing family members and colleagues himself. Cleavon Gilman, the ER doctor, told me that many health-care workers are traumatized after two years of repeatedly telling families that their loved one has died, “hearing that shrill cry on the phone over and over, and then going outside to see a world that’s acting like we’re lying about the numbers.” (Gilman also lost three colleagues to the pandemic: two nurses who died of COVID and a mentor who died of suicide after witnessing the first surge.) Alanna Badgley, the EMT, felt like something broke after Omicron arrived. In February, “at one point, I just started crying and couldn’t stop,” she told me. “I’m just so sad, and I don’t know how to feel better. It’s not like depression. It feels like grief.”
Some of the grievers I talked with feel kinship with COVID long-haulers, whose lives have been flattened by months or years of relentless symptoms and who similarly feel dismissed, ignored, and isolated. They didn’t die of COVID, but many nonetheless lost much of their former life. After getting infected in October 2020, Alexis Misko can no longer muster enough energy to stand for more than 10 minutes or sit upright for more than an hour. She was once an occupational therapist and an avid hiker, and “I grieve constantly for that person,” she wrote in 2021. Nick Güthe told me that after getting long COVID, his wife, Heidi Ferrer, went from being “one of the healthiest people I knew” to living with extreme fatigue and excruciating pain. “In the last weeks of her life, she couldn’t walk, eat most foods she enjoyed, or read a book,” Nick said. “It felt like bees were stinging her ankles all day long.” Heidi died of suicide last May. The doctor who treated her at the hospital and confirmed her death to Nick had never heard of long COVID.
In her book The Myth of Closure, Pauline Boss, a therapist and pioneer in the study of ambiguous loss, offers some advice for pandemic grievers: “It is not closure you need but certainty that your loved one is gone, that they understood why you could not be there to comfort them, that they loved you and forgave you in their last moments of life,” she wrote. Instead of waiting for a clean but mythical endpoint to one’s loss, it is better to search for “meaning and purpose in our lives after this horrific time in history,” she said.
Nick Güthe now pours his energy into raising awareness of long COVID, in part to honor one of Heidi’s last requests to him. “I’ve had to talk a lot of people with long COVID off the same ledge that my wife was on, and it’s been hard to turn away from that,” he said. “I’ve saved quite a few people at this point.” Alex Goldstein also feels compelled to continue posting tributes to the deceased on his @FacesofCOVID account, because it’s all the recognition that some grievers get. “A lot of folks tell me that when it’s late at night and they’re thinking about their loved one, they’ll go to the tweet and look at replies from strangers around the world,” he told me. Four days after her dad died, Sabila Khan started a Facebook group for COVID grievers, which now has 14,000 members. Shafqat was an activist who spent years advocating for Pakistani immigrants, and “this has become a way for me to keep his memory and good work alive,” Sabila told me. “It gives me purpose in my grief.”
In contrast to these grassroots efforts, national moments of mourning and remembrance have been rare and fleeting. A few art projects have powerfully commemorated the losses, but briefly. After collective tragedies, “the rites and rituals of mourning are meant to bring groups back together,” Wagner, the anthropologist, told me. “We’re seeing a process that’s almost antithetical to that, because mourning has been so fragmented and suspended.” Sabila told me that even as a Muslim, she felt more solidarity among fellow Americans after 9/11 than over the past two years. “We didn’t have that rallying moment with COVID,” she told me.
Some of the people I interviewed felt relieved when Biden presided over a lighting ceremony in February 2021, when the COVID death toll was just half what it currently is. But Kristin Urquiza told me that such gestures are “insignificant in comparison to the massive amount of death and suffering that we’ve had.” The nonprofit that she co-founded, Marked by COVID, is pushing the U.S. toward actions more fitting in scale. It wants the first Monday of March to be marked as a national COVID Memorial Day, and for permanent memorials to be erected around the country. “Putting my grief into a physical thing would take off some of the emotional heaviness,” Keyerra Snype told me. And having a solid, lasting memorial would go some way to assuring grievers that their loss is real, and that their loved ones mattered. Urquiza said that she’s striving for the country not just to remember her dad but to remember everything that cost him his life. “We can’t just put this in a memory hole, or we’ll forget,” she said. “I don’t want anyone to ever feel what I’ve had to feel.”
Wagner has seen similar dynamics after past atrocities, in which bereaved family members found themselves having to fight for recognition and reconciliation. “Why on earth should someone who lost multiple members of their family not be allowed to be with their grief, instead of bearing the responsibility for repairing society?” she said. “When it isn’t politically expedient for those in positions of power to commemorate the deaths and extend forms of reparation, it falls on the families.”
If there’s one thing Teresita Horne wants the world to know about Donovan, it’s that “he was one of the kindest souls anyone would have met,” she told me. Kindness is also the thing she most wants from everyone else, no matter their politics or their positions on the pandemic’s numerous controversies. One million people died in just over two years. It should be incontestable that they are gone, that they mattered, and that the millions more who loved them should get the grace and space to grieve and mourn.
All portraits featured here are courtesy of family and friends of the people pictured.
We heading for another lockdown and if y'all have family members that aren't vaxxed you should worry about them.
If I told you how many emails I've gotten from my kids high school and middle school concerning Covid exposure.....man. Possible exposure on the bus, in the classroom on the track team. It's getting serious out here and if you're not vaxxed you might have problems.
If I told you how many emails I've gotten from my kids high school and middle school concerning Covid exposure.....man. Possible exposure on the bus, in the classroom on the track team. It's getting serious out here and if you're not vaxxed you might have problems.