Counting the dead is one of the first, somber steps in reckoning with an event of enormous tragic scope, be that war, natural disaster or a pandemic.
This dark but necessary arithmetic has become all too routine during the COVID-19 outbreak.
January was the deadliest month so far in the U.S.; the virus killed more than 95,458 Americans.
The total U.S death toll has now surpassed 441,000.
Each death is unique, a devastating loss that ripples through a family, a network, a community. But in the aggregate, the national death toll can feel abstract, and its constant repetition in the news can become numbing. Journalists, commentators and public officials are left searching for new ways to convey the deadliness of this pathogen, and the significance of its mounting fatality rate.
Many have turned to history, citing Pearl Harbor (2,403 killed) or the 9/11 attacks (2,977 killed), as a way of providing perspective when the number of daily COVID deaths in the U.S. reached those levels. (Currently, more than 3,000 Americans are dying from COVID every day.)
Jan. 21, 2021 offered another opportunity for historical comparison: That was the day when the COVID death toll in the U.S. reached — and then exceeded — the 405,399 Americans who died in World War II.
For many, attempting to compare the two death tolls — or even take note of their brief conjunction — is misguided or even offensive. It is certainly a morally fraught exercise. The true emotional and social impact of either event can never be quantified, but many media outlets still mentioned it.
Which raises the question: Are we as a society too quick to reach for these historic comparisons? Should a politically driven world war and a biologically driven pandemic, more than seven decades apart, be put side by side at all?
"This is comparing apples to oranges," wrote NPR listener Kris Petron last month in response to a story that made use of that comparison. "It is extremely disrespectful to our nation's veterans, who write a blank check with their lives, to defend our Constitution."
Petron is not alone.
This type of response, over time, has convinced medical historian Dr. Howard Markel to make it a practice of never drawing parallels between the death toll from war and a pandemic.
"I try not to make comparisons to an event or group that I know contains within it a great deal of sentiment, feeling and pain," says Markel, a professor at the University of Michigan and author of When Germs Travel: Six Major Epidemics That Have Invaded America and the Fears They Have Unleashed.
The notion that combat deaths carry a unique meaning or value is deeply rooted in human culture. Societies tend to valorize those who died for a cause on a battlefield.
But in this pandemic it's the frail elderly — many of them living in nursing homes and assisted living facilities — who have died in vast numbers.
"To the watching world, that's not the same as the death of a young soldier in their 20s, let's say, on the front lines in a war," says Yale historian Frank Snowden, author of Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present.
"But, I don't think we have a right to weigh up lives and say which is more important," Snowden added.
Unlike COVID-19, the global influenza pandemic of 1918-19 killed many people who were in their 20s and 30s — yet as Snowden notes, there wasn't much collective mourning for those young adults, despite dying in the prime of life.
"People were so used to mortality because of the [first world] war that even the horrible tallies that were coming with the Spanish influenza had lost their capacity to horrify the way that one might expect," he says.