Display by artist Sonya Clark is on view through next August at TCF Center downtown to recognize Covid losses. (Photo: TCF Center)Michigan Advance, a Lansing news site, places today's commemoration of the terror attacks 20 years ago into context of the ongoing war against Covid-19:
The virus has killed 4.6 million people around the world and 658,865 Americans, per tracking compiled by The New York Times. In the United States, that’s the equivalent of the lives lost in 219 9/11 events.
In Michigan, 21,807 people have died, per the NYT, which uses state and local health data for its tracker. According to state Department of Health and Human Services data of confirmed deaths, Michigan has had 20,506 people die since March 2020. Either way, that’s the equivalent of about seven 9/11s.
The brief item by founding editor Susan J. Demas notes that eight states have many more Covid fatalities than Michigan over the past 19 months. In descending order, they are California, Texas, New York, Florida, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Illinois and Georgia.
Separately, in his Substack newsletter, veteran broadcast journalist Dan Rather posts today: "9/11 has receded and now we are confronting a different type of mass death, at a scale that is unimaginable. Except we don’t have to imagine it. We are living it."
