ANGELA CHEN: I don't think we had any sense of magnitude
that the virus would kind of take
on over the last two years.
But we did certainly feel like we were
on the precipice of something.
MARTHA LINCOLN: Assumptions were that maybe we
would reach some hundred thousands,
like a few hundred thousand.
And that seemed astronomical.
I don't remember a single prediction
that the United States would see 1 million
casualties from COVID-19.
RICHARD KELLER: I think we've really failed as a society
to see the pandemic as a collective risk that
demands collective solutions.
Now, as a result, we're seeing an enormous discounting
of those deaths as somehow deaths
that don't really matter.
LORI PEEK: It does take my breath away that we're soon
to have a million people in two years who
have died from this pandemic.
We have therefore made the assessment that COVID-19 can
be characterized as a pandemic.
ANGELA CHEN: As emergency medicine doctors,
we are really trained to handle the unexpected.
And with this particular virus, especially in March of 2020,
we were really figuring it out.
And so we didn't have the knowledge and the know-how.
And the feeling that I had was hopelessness and helplessness.
LORI PEEK: There was a lot of compassion around that.
There was a lot of focus on collective mourning.
But as time passed, I think that what we also saw
was a lot of this kind of compassion fatigue.
And death went from being a collective problem
to be solved to really being an individualized issue, where we
were sort of pointing fingers and saying,
you were vaccinated or not vaccinated.
MARTHA LINCOLN: Media coverage has
really moved away from the horror, pain,
and pathos of COVID deaths.
It's tough from the perspective of news
because the news around COVID deaths
has been just more and more and more of the same.
And so, unfortunately, that has meant
that some of the novelty and the shock and the concern
has been worn down.
RICHARD KELLER: As we're increasingly accepting
these deaths as part of the general background
of preventable mortality, what we're
seeing is a real kind of turning away from the commemoration
of those deaths.
ANGELA CHEN: How do we begin to heal
from the significant impact that this had?
But also, how do we begin to repair broken parts
of the society that we live in that this virus
really demonstrated to us?
LORI PEEK: In a lot of ways, I mean,
local health care systems, there's
this crisis still unfolding.
But then at the national scale is sort of like, we moved on.
A large of Americans are vaccinated.
We're over this pandemic.
And so I think that's been really, really
hard as the pandemic stretched on to sort of make sense of it
and to figure out, how are we going
to move forward as a society?
RICHARD KELLER: There's been an effort
to dedicate the first Monday of March
as a national day of mourning, a national day of commemoration,
for those lost to COVID-19.
That has remained stalled in Congress.
I think that would, however, be a critical step
toward recognizing the truly exceptional nature
of these deaths.
MARTHA LINCOLN: We've seen more total casualties than
any other country in the world.
So that should be really shocking.
This is not the normal course of events.
We do not have to accept this.
We have other choices.
LORI PEEK: One of the things that we can all
do as individuals is to try to pause
and to really remember that there is
a story behind every statistic.
ANGELA CHEN: A million lives is a huge number.
But no matter what that number is,
that number kind of means nothing
in the face of individual loss of a loved one.
It's been a tremendously difficult two years.
And so showing some amount of kindness and patience, I think,
really will go a long way to rebuilding from the impact
that COVID had.