By now, the numbers are numbing. Months into the coronavirus pandemic, more than 100,000 people in the United States are dead and 1.55 million have tested positive.

Behind those numbers are names and individual people. They are mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, friends, grandparents and grandchildren, and even a days-old baby in Chicago.

All dead—lives cut off without mercy by the coronavirus. Lives that could have—and should have—continued had the U.S. government taken positive moves, early, to limit its spread and stop its impact. Other nations did. Columbia University researchers estimated that had U.S. lockdowns started on March 1, not March 19, at least 54,000 would still be alive. 

And those aren’t the only victims. Most of the nation’s governors and mayors did their best to fill the vacuum GOP President Trump left. Those officials had to take drastic measures to try to reverse the “community spread” of the virus, by limiting social contact between people—wear masks, stay six feet apart, etc.—and by banning large crowds.

The result was a forced mass closure of businesses, collapse of commerce, devastation of cities and states and economies, and 38.6 million people newly unemployed, and counting.

All of them, too, along with the rest of us impacted by these measures, are coronavirus pandemic victims.

We all are mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, friends and relatives. We all have names. And those of us who are dead had the right to live, until Trump took it away.

Does Trump realize that behind those numbers are real people? It doesn’t sound like it. He blithely talks about 100,000 dead being better than initial estimates of 200,000. He waves his Nielsen television ratings, more numbers, in our faces. He shouts “LIBERATE!” and encourages armed gangs to force states to open up too soon, regardless of the human cost.

There’s one number that matters to him: 270. That’s the number of electoral votes he needs to win a second term in the White House. As long as he gets that, he doesn’t care about the names.  We do. Remember in November. 

(PAI)