On a Thursday night in early January, the disease that would become known as COVID-19 claimed its first victim, a 61-year-old man who succumbed to the newly identified coronavirus in the city of Wuhan, in the Peoples Republic of China.
Nine months later, the pandemic took its millionth life. And while the vagaries of record-keeping mean we may never know who that victim was, the fact remains: COVID has killed a million people.
Tens of millions of things undone. Daughters and sons unborn, works of genius uncreated. Pieces of communities excised. Entire residential complexes filled with older people ravaged. Human contribution melted away, with no way of ever knowing or chronicling what was lost. Accounting for whats missing when people die is never an easy task; now it is one multiplied by an entire million.
A new…