How did this many deaths become normal?

A simple google search would have shown the author that on average about 2.5 million americans die each year. So millions of americans dying is the norm. Not only that as the population continues to age, the number of deaths will only climb until we hit an inflection point. Besides, what does he want? Americans to be hysterically grieving for eternity? What's with the media and their neverending campaign to have us scared, depressed, angry and self-loathing. Shouldn't we be celebrating that covid wasn't as bad as predicted. I remember in the beginning, some people were predicting 5% or 10% death rate.

> America is accepting not only a threshold of death but also a gradient of death. Elderly people over the age of 75 are 140 times more likely to die than people in their 20s.

The author thinks we shouldn't be accepting of the fact that people in the last stage of their lives have a higher death rate than the people in the prime of their lives?

> It often occurs because of active distortion by politicians and the press, Lewandowsky told me. (For example, a poll that found that mask mandates are favored by 50 percent of Americans and opposed by just 28 percent was nonetheless framed in terms of waning support.)

I think the author has it backwards. The 50% support mask mandates is due to politicians and the press not the 28%. After all, 100% of americans were against mask mandates prior to the politicians and the press pushing mask mandates.

The media will say overpopulation is the cause of climate change and we should feel bad and we need less people. Then they'll say we should feel bad because a few hundred thousand more people died in the US than normal. No matter what, we should be scared, sad, angry, depressed, etc. Then they'll peddle pharmaceutical ads.

Without making a moral judgement on it, I think the largest factor is that on some level societies consider the death of the elderly due to disease natural.

Why is the Atlantic finding it hard to believe that we are normalising pandemic deaths?

We have done just the same with the HIV/AIDS pandemic, which is still ongoing by the way. People would be surprised to know how many people die of AIDS in the World each year.

And future does not look so bright either. Would not be surprised if we soon have to deal with a third pandemic at the same time.

> We don’t honor deaths that we ascribe to individual failings, which could explain, Keller argues, why national moments of mourning have been scarce.

I always think of the argument of Eliphaz in the book of Job. It’s interesting that we have this built in belief that illness is connected to moral failings.

Normal? Accepting?

Did you forget about lockdowns, mask mandates, the unprecedented speed at which we developed and deployed the vaccine, that all news for the last two years were almost all about covid (only recently displaced by the Ukraine war).

You call that normal?! Though it is a completely different thing, it almost makes 9/11 looks like a detail. With 9/11, we had a few days of cancelled flights, and more security checks, with covid, we had months when we couldn't fly at all, and the time we could, we had masks and tests, sometimes even quarantines. Covid is the most world-changing event since WW2.

And all that because we didn't want people to die. We could have let people die, humanity never was is danger of extinction or anything like that. In fact, it could have been a way to "help society get rid of the burden of the elderly" (a common theme among conspiracy theorists). But no, we wanted people to stay alive, as if we weren't monsters.

In fact, many people think we overdid it, a debatable position, but in any way, we are totally not considering it "normal".

But it's not normal, it's a pandemic.

The million covid deaths are being ignored because they're politically embarrassing for Joe Biden and Democrats. Otherwise the NYT would be running a multipage spread listing the names of the deceased. I wish it was more complicated than that but it isn't.