Covid Lives Lost

I know we've all seen the data - the number of people who have died from COVID-19 in the US alone is quickly approaching 1,000,000.

That's a lot of people.

It really hit home to me as I was driving to visit a friend yesterday and crossed the Kansas City city limits, with its population sign announcing some 489,000 people live here. This means, in the two years the country has been coexisting with this virus, the people who have died from it would have filled my town. Twice over.

Imagine.

The crowded sidewalks of the Plaza and Westport. The hallways of the museums, the paths at the zoo. The hospitals teeming with staff and patients. Block after block, from trendy condos, to apartment towers; from exclusive houses on huge lots with their carefully sculpted landscaping, to the rehabbed or run-down airplane bungalows crowded into the streets of the east side. 

Empty.

The young moms smiling at their stroller-ensconced babies as they walk around the park. The exercisers, the walkers and runners, with whom they share the path. The people in the center of the park, throwing balls for their delighted dogs. 

Gone.

The tired workers and demanding customers in the restaurants and grocery stores. The greasy mechanics in the car repair shops and the car owners hoping the bill won't be too high. The teachers and students who fill the schools with their joys and frustrations, laughter and tears.

Died.

Imagine miles of roads, their lights mindlessly switching from green to yellow to red, beckoning to no one. No obnoxiously loud motorcycles on the streets, no beleaguered Amazon delivery drivers, no SUVs or sedans or police cars or fire trucks.

Silence.

It's like the times when I ventured out during the lockdown days of the first months of the pandemic, the streets eerily silent, except that instead of all the people being tucked behind their closed doors hoping the shutdown wouldn't last too long, they're all dead. Twice over.

It would make for shocking fiction. Even as I write, my mind tries to evade the reality that it's fact. The number seems staggeringly (is that a word?) bigger when I mentally gather all those people into one place, give them the faces I see as I move about my days.

*sigh* May they Rest in Peace.