Just last week, we hit the unimaginable milestone of losing 250,000 American souls to COVID-19. That’s a quarter of a million people who won’t be here for the holiday season. So many families are bearing grief. So many families who weren’t able to be with their loved on as they passed away. It hasn’t taken that much time for these deaths to occur. In just nine months, the time that we carry and birth life, we have birthed all these deaths.
That number is really difficult to comprehend, so there have been people trying to help us remember by setting up that many empty chairs in front of the White House or comparing it to the number of people lost in a major historic events. Something, anything to try to get us our minds and our hearts to pay attention that we are not living in ordinary times and that changing the way that we live and interact with the world around us is the only way that we can stop the spread.
Even as we hit that terrible marker, millions of Americans are traveling for Thanksgiving, against the CDC advice. We are hitting record numbers every day and more than 10 million people are currently infected with the disease. It is literally all around us.
If we were to dedicate 1 second to each soul lost thus far, it would equal 2.89 days. That would be three days of staying home in honor of those who have passed away. Is one second too much to ask?