Visualizing the 1 million Americans we’ve lost to COVID-19
How the news media and artist Suzanne Firstenberg showed the scale of loss
The U.S. has now lost at least 1 million people to COVID-19, a once unfathomable death toll that’s higher than the death toll of two decades of car crashes, the population of six states, and all U.S. wars combined.
For its May 15, 2022 front page, the New York Times marked 996,612 COVID deaths for which a county is known across a full back-to-front map of U.S. states and Puerto Rico, by graphics editor Jeremy White. The paper used the headline “One Million: A Nation’s Immeasurable Grief.”
“For more than two years, Americans have made their way through a pandemic that has upended plans, brought tumult and despair, and sickened millions,” the Times’ Julie Bosman wrote.
“But one group has been forced onto a separate path,” she wrote. “These are the loved ones of the nearly one million people in the United States who have now died of COVID-19, a catastrophic toll that reflects a death rate higher than in almost any other wealthy country. These families have walked a path in isolation, mourning, and anger. They are carrying a grief that feels lonely, permanent, and agonizingly removed from the country’s shared journey.”
Axios published a special report with a timeline showing when COVID’s death toll surpassed the population of major American cities, like Salt Lake City on Sept. 21, 2020, and San Francisco on Jan. 25, 2022. The Washington Post’s front page story included an illustration of a flower in water with ripples emanating outward, by illustrator Hokyoung Kim.
Suzanne Firstenberg’s installation In America: Remember honored our COVID dead last year on the National Mall and it ended its run when the death toll hit more than 700,000. Online, Firstenberg updated her work, posting images combining actual photos of the installation with projections of what it would look like now, with 1 million flags. It covers 40% more ground with even more flags extending all the way to 17th St. NW and flags up around the Washington Monument.
When I visited the installation last September to remember my father who died from COVID in February 2021, Firstenberg told me the flags made grief viewable. She thought it was too soon to build a permanent memorial then, but she now believes it’s time.
“I have changed my mind,” she wrote on Instagram. “We have no place to house America’s groundswell of grief.”