The Interminable Body Count

We rely on numbers to understand the size and scope of tragedy—to gauge what went wrong and put the damage in perspective. More Americans have now died from the coronavirus than were killed in the September 11 terrorist attacks, multiple news outlets announced yesterday.

But we likely won’t have an estimate of how many Americans have died as a result of the pandemic for a very long time—maybe months, maybe a year. We will almost certainly never know the exact number. “It sounds like it could be totally obvious—just count body bags,” John Mutter, an environmental-science professor at Columbia University who studies the role of natural disasters in human well-being, told me in an interview this week. “It’s not obvious at all.”

When Hurricane Maria flattened Puerto Rico in September 2017, the storm’s devastation was overwhelming. Yet the in December stood at 64 people—a number that almost no one believed, as my colleague Vann. Nearly a year after the storm, a team of researchers tried to develop their own estimate. They gathered months’ worth of mortality data from households across the island and published a concluding that, in actuality, more than 4,600 deaths were potentially attributable to the hurricane—70 times the official number.