Canada has surpassed 45,000 COVID-19 deaths
And media's nowhere on the milestone
It’s something else to watch a pandemic be written out of our collective consciousness in real time. Politicians don’t pretend that COVID-19 is over, they pretend that it never happened. And yet, people are still catching the virus and still dying … and Canada surpassed 45,000 COVID deaths yesterday.
As I wrote on Twitter, 45,000 is the same number of Canadians who died in WW2. That's more than 15 9/11s. That's 2,813 hockey player bus accidents. It’s an astounding number of individual traumas — traumas that all will be absorbed by society in ways that our society is not able to handle.
But maybe these deaths aren’t that important. Certainly not compared to The Queen, whose death has dominated news coverage. How much does CBC pay to send dozens of people to England to watch people cry as a coffin drives by? Are there not enough coffins in Canada to get local content? How many of the 45,000 COVID deaths (or the tens of thousands in excess deaths) were never laid to rest by family and friends? Never had last rites, ceremony, diginities —
We’ll never know.
But we will know that unlike the 45,000 milestone, journalists care more to talk about Justin Trudeau daring to sing. Publicly. Around a piano. It’s perfect fodder — a non-story that can whip up conservatives, give liberals something to use to defend Trudeau and everyone else looks and say — yeah maybe fuck the mainstream news in this country.
45,012+ deaths. Disporportionately elderly, disabled, poor and racialized. Disporportionately ignored. Marginalized in their deaths as so many of them were marginalized in their lives.
But you can’t say that on television in this country.
Thanks so much for this, Nora.
And the numbers of infected people are so many more than the "cases" reported by public health officials, never mind the younger people with long COVID that affects their abilities to live, work, enjoy a full life, perhaps have kids. The long-term consequences of these preventable illnesses are horrific. So much comes down to the failure to accept aerosols and airborne transmission, from which flow effective solutions that involve cleaning the air and preventing inhalation of those particles.
This is very terrible but it would be worse if there weren't the number of vaccinations that exist. I think if everyone was vaccinated this situation would be better and the fault is those on the right who spread misinformation about the effectiveness of the vaccine. There should be a special place in Hell for these people!!!