AP reporter: Has mass death become tolerable in America?

“Has mass death become accepted in America?” Associated Press reporter Michelle R. Smith raised this question in an article published on May 21. The article gathered opinions from various experts and criticized the indifference of the United States to deaths caused by COVID-19 and gun violence.

Smith noted the nation marked a milestone of 1 million deaths from COVID-19 shortly before a weekend of deadly shootings. The number, once unthinkable, is now an irreversible reality in the United States.

In her article, some experts and professors shared their views on the high rates of death and suffering in the US.

“If I thought the AIDS epidemic was bad, the American response to COVID-19 has sort of ... it’s a form of the American grotesque, right?” said Gregg Gonsalves, an epidemiologist and professor at Yale who was also a leading member of the AIDS advocacy group ACT UP. “Really — a million people are dead? And you’re going to talk to me about your need to get back to normal, when for the most part most of us have been living pretty reasonable lives for the past six months?”

Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, a sociology professor at the University of Minnesota who studies mortality, said certain communities have always borne the brunt of higher death rates in the United States. “There are profound racial and class inequalities in the United States, and our tolerance of death is partly based on who is at risk.”

The sense politicians have done little even as the violence repeats itself is shared by many Americans. It’s a dynamic encapsulated by the “thoughts and prayers” offered to victims of gun violence by politicians unwilling to make meaningful commitments to ensure there really is no more “never again,” according to Martha Lincoln, an anthropology professor at San Francisco State University who studies the cultural politics of public health.

Smith said with COVID-19, American society has even come to accept the deaths of children from a preventable cause. According to a recent guest column published in The Advocate newspaper, pediatrician Dr. Mark W. Kline pointed out more than 1,500 children have died from COVID-19 according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, despite the “myth” it is harmless to children. Kline wrote there was a time in pediatrics when “children were not supposed to die.”

There are many parallels between the US response to COVID-19 and its response to the gun violence epidemic, said Sonali Rajan, a professor at Columbia University who researches school violence.

Rajan said mass death in the US has been long normalized and gun violence has persisted as a public health crisis for decades. She also noted an estimated 100,000 people are shot every year and some 40,000 will die.

When Rajan looks at the current response to COVID-19, she sees similar dynamics. Americans, she says, “deserve to be able to commute to work without getting sick, or work somewhere without getting sick, or send their kids to school without them getting sick.”