On April 1, I started to feel like this pandemic was something that I needed to document. I often feel the need to document things – I’ve been blogging for almost 13 years now (wow, that made me feel old) and I’ve been writing in a journal for 18 years, on and off. That’s a long time of feeling like “This experience is important. I need to document this experience.” and then doing so through writing. It doesn’t matter that I share the writing with other people, but it matters that I write it and that I keep it.
Nearly every day, I’ve been writing down the statistics around COVID-19 in my notebook – how many people have it, how many people have died from it, and how it’s spread. Sometimes I’ll compare the number of people who have it or have died from it to the population of a city, to give myself a sense of scale. It’s hard to understand how many people 166,056 really is, but when I think of that as being more than every single person in the city where I live, that gives me context. And it feels huge.
It’s turned into this sort of processing ritual. To make sense of everything that’s happening in the world right now, I have this habit – I look at the numbers, I write them down, and I try to grasp the scale of everything.
It makes me feel the same way I feel when I look at this cover of the Sunday New York Times from May 24. Every single person who has died from COVID-19 was a person who had impact on the people around them – their family, their community.