key: cord-0727857-2u18fj2p authors: Dudziak, Mary L title: The Numbers: Encountering Casualties in the Era of Covid-19 date: 2021-06-30 journal: Diplomatic History DOI: 10.1093/dh/dhab006 sha: d03f2369f5c36a706be1f12f282ae1e8df4043d9 doc_id: 727857 cord_uid: 2u18fj2p nan It was hard to shake off the dread in the summer of 2020 as Covid-19 ravaged the United States. My husband and I focused on keeping family members safe, which was something that, at the time, seemed manageable. Widening the gaze to the country and the world left me drowning in tragedy. Then one morning a story in my Twitter feed stopped me in my tracks. Someone I had never heard of had died in Zimbabwe of Covid-19. Cosmas Magaya was a mbira master. 1 I had to Google "mbira" to know what that was: a wooden board with metal tines, and "a family of musical instruments, traditional to the Shona people of Zimbabwe." 2 Ethnomusicologist Paul F. Berliner, Magaya's co-author, friend, and collaborator, wrote in a University of Chicago Press tribute that Magaya was "one of the world's great musicians, mentors, and cultural ambassadors," and "was universally loved by his following." He was a farmer, a village headman, and a preserver of Shona culture. Magaya had a global reach, and, with his ensemble, performed at New York's Washington Square Church two weeks after 9/11. This was "profoundly healing," Berliner remembered. 3 The essay moved me to tears. The particularity of Cosmas Magaya's life broke through the Covid-19 casualty data that summer, and it shed light on a conceptual problem I was puzzling over before the crisis hit: how, paradoxically, the scale of casualties can obscure the human consequences of catastrophe and war. The more there are, the less we manage to see. We are confronted with casualty numbers on a daily basis: infection rates, hospitalization rates, death rates, often displayed in *I am grateful to the Diplomatic History Editors and my Emory colleague Deborah Dinner for their thoughtful comments on this essay, and to Emory Law student Joe Pinto for help with research. I expand on the culture and politics of death in 2020 in "Mass Death and Everyday Life," in After Life: Death and Loss in 2020 America, ed. Keri Leigh Merritt, Rhae Lynn Barnes, and Yohuru Williams (in progress). 1. seven-day-averages. There are statistics on comparative vulnerabilities based on location, race and ethnicity, gender, and especially age. 4 The numbers tell us whether to be terrified or hopeful. They are a technology of public policy; they are a political foil. The numbers are the data my husband and I use in conversations with family members. The warning: be safe, or you could be one of those numbers. But the numbers have become a concrete wall. Their opacity makes them numbing. The numbness is paralyzing. I found this paralysis to be puzzling. After all, death has become an academic interest of mine. I have been writing about war and death: about the way American war's persistence, and its geographic distance from the U.S. polity, renders war an abstraction, undermining political engagement with armed conflict. In the words of World War II reporter Ernie Pyle, quoted in my SHAFR Presidential Lecture: "You didn't see him lying so grotesque and pasty beside the gravel road in France." Those on the battlefield "saw him by the multiple thousands. That's the difference." 5 Geographic distance is a central component of my analysis. It distinguishes the Civil War, fought on U.S. soil, from the contemporary experience of war for U.S. civilians. Historian Drew Gilpin Faust shows the profound impact of Civil War death on U.S. society and culture, generating a "republic of suffering." 6 Contemporary distant wars are instead met with widespread apathy. When the pandemic broke, I thought it was a crisis that would be palpable because it was present. The dead would be known and seen. The mourning would be shared. I also thought, for about a couple of weeks, that my readers would better understand my argument that the presence or distance of the corporeal experience of war has mattered to the trajectory of American civilian engagement with it. I expected that proximate Covid-19 deaths would motivate Americans to take action to save lives. I was wrong about all of this, of course, and my wrongness made me think harder. One reason I was wrong was the problem of seeing. 7 Faust argues that the impact of Civil War death was so extensive that even Americans isolated from the conflict were palpably affected. An example is Emily Dickinson, who lived a secluded life but whose poetry was infused with war imagery as she wrote intensely during the war years. 8 But during the Civil War itself, many thought that seeing the bodies, even in photographs, was profoundly important. When residents of Waterbury, Connecticut traveled to the Antietam battlefield to look for their neighbors, the death and suffering they saw made them "sick at heart, feeling that we could imagine something of the horrors of a battle, which we before had no conception of." 9 After viewing Matthew Brady's exhibition of graphic photographs of the Antietam dead, the writer and physician Oliver Wendell Holmes advised that those who wish "to know what war is" should see the images. 10 It is as if sight mediated ignorance, even for residents of a nation torn by war on their own soil. If seeing the dead was profoundly important, even for Civil War Americans, then solidarity through suffering seems more fractured than a "republic" of suffering might suggest. And a fracture was present at the time, for the dead bodies that moved Northern viewers were white soldiers, not the more diverse population, including enslaved people, in the settled area of the battlefield. politically generative. 12 Can it resonate beyond the direct sensory experience? And when tragic impacts are conveyed principally through the abstraction of numbers, what is the effect? * "If people could only see what it is like in the hospitals, they would stay at home," an Italian with Covid-19 texted to his friend in the United States, as the virus raged through his country. 13 The image of the pandemic within the United States was at first a spiky ball, said to represent the shape of the virus molecule. Later it was charts, and then interactive maps. States with spiking numbers were colored red. Journalists reported about ventilator shortages, but we could not see them, or the make-shift intensive care units, or the hospital beds in temporary structures in public parks. Families were generally barred from visitation, so last words were said on cell phones. Touch and physical comfort could only be offered by medical workers, if they had time. Dying resulted in a transition from one column of numbers (the infected) to another (the dead). The deceased were publicly known principally as numerical values, until the names of a thousand who died appeared on the front page of the New York Times when the body count reached nearly one hundred times that number. Obituaries in the Times and elsewhere were accompanied by photographs from when the deceased was alive. 14 The corpses themselves remained The idea that a disaster can give rise to a beloved community seems a better fit with temporally and geographically compact disasters, rather than catastrophes with a longer time horizon and broader geographic expanse, like Covid-19. The Covid era instead appears to deepen social cleavages, with particularly harsh impacts on non-white and low income communities. See, for example, Centers for Disease Control, "Health Equity Considerations and Racial and Ethnic Minority Groups," July 24, 2020, last accessed August 8, 2020, https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019ncov/community/health-equity/race-ethnicity.html; Sarah Smith, "The cost of coronavirus: Houston families face tens of thousands in bills after loved ones die," Houston Chronicle, August 5, 2020, last accessed August 8, 2020, https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/ houston/article/covid-cost-hospital-bills-rent-cremation-tx-money-15460371.php. On the erasure of vulnerable communities, and its consequences, see Marc Lamont Hill, Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond (New York, 2016). On political cleavage, see L.D. Burnett, "This Republic of Quarantine: Will COVID Bring Us to a Grief Divided?" Medium, November 19, 2020, last accessed February 14, 2021, https://arcdigital.media/this-republic-of-quarantine-640b4e2c0ca5. 13. Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, "Where are the Photos of People Dying of Covid?" New York Times, May 1, 2020, last accessed August 7, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/01/opinion/coronavirus-photography.html. 14. "U.S. Deaths Near 100,000, An Incalculable Loss," New York Times, May 24, 2020, last accessed August 8, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/23/reader-center/coronavirus-newyork-times-front-page.html; "Those We've Lost," New York Times, updated August 7, 2020, last accessed August 8, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/obituaries/peopledied-coronavirus-obituaries.html. shrouded, so that the dead were remembered as intact faces, unlike the sunken visages of Civil War photographs. Some reporters and photographers challenged the sanitization of Covid-19 death. Nicholas Kristof wrote of conditions in an overcrowded Bronx hospital in April 2020, but the images and video accompanying the article were largely of health care workers. Because of privacy restrictions and fear of infection, "reporters and photographers found it much easier to be embedded in Army units in Iraq or Afghanistan than to embed with doctors fighting Covid-19," he wrote. 15 Alix Monteleone of Brooklyn, New York, spent a day in March 2020 watching from a third-floor window across from the Wyckoff Heights hospital. She looked down upon a temporary morgue: a 53-foot refrigerated trailer shrouded by panels intending to block the view. It was officially known as a "Body Collection Point." Only nine bodies fit in the hospital morgue, and it had filled many times over in the course of three weeks. Mortuaries throughout the city were overwhelmed. Monteleone could not see the bodies themselves as workers carried them into the truck over the course of the day, but she could see what covered them: zipped-up bags, or simply sheets. "Dignity" required both refrigeration and an effort to shield them from view. 16 The dead themselves could no longer experience this dignity protection, absent a belief that their perceptions persist in a spirit world. This simply reinforces, as Thomas Laquere has shown, that our ideas about protecting the dead serve the needs of the living. 17 It would be impossible, in the age of drones, to obscure completely what happened to some bodies afterwards. In New York, those unclaimed, or whose families were unable to hire mortuary services, found their way to Hart Island, long used as a burial ground for the unclaimed dead. By mid-April, the number buried on the island had increased by five times over the usual number per week. 18 The city closed the island to the press. Photojournalist George Steinmetz thought Covid-19 casualties were "basically being treated like they're toxic waste, like they're radioactive," and it was important to document their treatment. He launched a small drone from a nearby parking lot, but plainclothes New York City police officers in an unmarked van emerged, and confiscated the drone. They charged him with the misdemeanor of "avigation," or taking off or landing an aircraft anywhere other than an airport. 19 The general counsel for the National Press Photographers Association, Mickey Osterreicher, objected to the seizure. Public safety mattered, of course, he suggested, but "reporting on and images of mass burials anywhere in the U.S. is a newsworthy event but especially during the pandemic it is certainly a matter of public concern." 20 Steinmetz's images and those of AP photographer John Minchillo showed mass graves with pine caskets stacked on top of each other, at least three deep, in neat rows. 21 The images of tidy stacks of pine caskets are jarring, but they conceal a sight that would tear more deeply at the body politic: unembalmed human remains, like the dead on the Antietam battlefield. The sight of Covid-19 death was cleansed of its corporeality, rendering it inoffensive. In contrast to the graphic photographs of Civil War carnage displayed in a gallery, death was instead revealed through numbers, graphs, and shaded maps. This may have protected the sensibility of the community, and it is hard to imagine complacency surviving if instead of names and numbers the public confronted the bodies themselves. But in the second year of the 1918-19 flu pandemic, when mass death was palpable, it shrunk the social order, as city dwellers retreated in fear, leaving orphans and the dying alone. 22 Numbers of the dead are often reported in wars. They have sometimes been used as measures of military progress. 23 Photographers from the war in Vietnam found the Covid-19 reporting to be different, however. "When a guy was killed in Vietnam, there was a big hoopla as he came home," recalled Robert Hodierne. "The flag-draped coffin, and the bugler playing taps. The family was given the flag, and everybody would gather around for the burial. . . . COVID, you take your loved one to the hospital, and you never see them again." Covering a war was easier, David Hume Kennerly thought, with 19. Christopher Robbins, "NYPD Seizes Drone of Photojournalist Documenting Mass Burials on Hart Island," Gothamist, April 17, 2020, last accessed August 7, 2020, https://gothamist.com/news/nypd-seizes-drone-photojournalist-documenting-mass-burials-hart-island. 20. Ibid. 21. Aaron Holmes, "A photojournalist captured aerial pictures of a mass grave being built in New York City before police confiscated his drone," Business Insider, April 20, 2020, last accessed August 3, 2020, https://www.businessinsider.com/photos-police-block-drones-fromphotographing-nyc-mass-grave-site-2020-4. Covid-19 tables and graphs both reveal and conceal. They are intended to illuminate, but turning casualties into numbers accomplishes an erasure of the dead themselves. As Jaqueline Wernimont writes of the seventeenth-century plague, the path of the disease itself becomes the news. In the face of incommensurable losses, a table of numbers is thought to provide "a view of the whole." An abstraction was seen as more accurate than messy lists of names of plague casualties. But through aggregation, Wernimont observes, the dead were "rendered meaningless to the state in their own moment." They mattered not for who they were and what they did, but as statistical information for the state for population-related policies. 25 Concealment of horror has been part of a civilizing process, political scientist Timothy Pachirat argues. For example, the sight of killing animals in a 24. Amanda Darrach, "'When the heart gets filtered up through the camera': Vietnam War photographers on how to cover COVID better," Columbia Journalism Review, August 3, 2020, last accessed August 4, 2020, https://www.cjr.org/special_report/vietnam-war-photographerscovid.php. slaughterhouse would shock most people, but that very shock is "predicated on the operations that remove from sight, without actually eliminating, equally shocking practices required to sustain the orbit of their everyday lives." 26 At Hart Island and elsewhere, as in the slaughterhouse, unseen workers handle the death we don't see. Concealment in the pandemic may seem cultural-in keeping with cultural sensibilities about respect for the dead body-but the politics of sight is always enabled by power and interest. What happens to bodies in war is grotesque. Ernie Pyle wrote that many in the war zone "have had burned into their brains forever the unnatural sight of cold dead men scattered over the hillsides and in the ditches along the high rows of hedge throughout the world. . . . Dead men in such monstrous infinity that you come almost to hate them." 27 But even Pyle protected his readers. 28 He has no columns on how the dead became carrion. Perhaps death in the era of Covid-19 is not quite as brutal, though patients often die alone, unable to breathe. Mostly we don't know. What I have learned from the unsettling culture, politics, and practices of the Covid-19 era is that proximity does not itself produce awareness. Although the geographic distance of U.S. war enables cultural distance-Pyle's warning about the failure to see-nearness does not itself produce engagement. This contingency goes beyond Susan Sontag's point that sight is not determinative: atrocity photographs do not necessarily provoke sympathetic outrage. 29 Seeing is not an inevitable consequence of proximity, but is a choice. Dickinson's engagement with the "republic of suffering," for example, must have been something she decided, and not a consequence of her times. Proximity is necessary, but not always sufficient, to trigger sensory experience of a catastrophe. Further, the experience of a calamity has its own politics, which can be coproduced by a state and its citizen: governments safeguard the dignity of the bodies, dampening outrage over mass death; individuals make choices either to be satisfied with numbers, or to walk, perhaps virtually, among the dead. * Covid-19 is a close-up daily experience for many. People defined as "essential workers"-from healthcare providers to postal carriers to meatpacking workers-navigate the danger. Prisoners are incarcerated within it. It has had a pronounced impact on communities of color. 30 The very idea of "social distancing" as protection against illness assumes a liberty that is defied by inequality. 31 In many U.S. neighborhoods, however, the sound of the pandemic has been silence. As I write, ambulance sirens rarely break the quiet, even though I am less than a mile from a major hospital. As of today, August 7, 2020, overcrowding at the Emory University Hospital is "severe," with Emergency and Intensive Care Unit patients diverted to other hospitals. 32 In other words, the situation very near my home is dire. Yet my street is quiet. I hear birds and occasional vehicles. I do not hear the sound of hospital machinery working to keep Covid-19 patients alive. I do not hear when it shuts down. I do not know when an exhausted medical worker makes the call to report that a dear one has died. I do not see the body, or the body bag, or the transport vehicle. The experience of catastrophe is fueled by and reconfigures politics, but knowing this does not cast off a blanket of grief. I am left with the stories I stumble upon, like the loss of Cosmas Magaya. And I am left with cold tables of numbers. Life and Death in the 'Hot Zone I Still Can't Believe What I'm Seeing': What It's Like to Live Across the Street From a Temporary Morgue During the Coronavirus Outbreak For an argument that the interests of the dead themselves persist, see The Constitution After Death Burials on Hart Island, where New York's unclaimed lie in mass graves, have risen fivefold Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight On Victory in Europe You didn't see him lying Regarding the Pain of Others COVID-19 and Its Disproportionate Impact on Racial and Ethnic Minorities in the United States The Color of Covid: The Racial Justice Paradox of Our New Stay-at-Home Economy No One Is Listening to Us Meatpacking plants have highest number of active COVID cases On inequalities and earlier U.S. pandemics, see Witt, American Contagions. 32. Regional Patient Distribution, Regional Coordinating Center 4. See, for example, "Geographic Differences in COVID-19 Cases, Deaths, and Incidence -United States, February 12-April 7, 2020," Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 69, no. 15 (2020): DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.mm6915e4 (last accessed November 9, 2020); "2 Metrics 7-Day Average Curves," The Covid Tracking Project, last accessed November 9, 2020, https://covidtracking.com/data/charts/2-metrics-7-day-average-curves.