Putting COVID-19 deaths in perspective

Big news hit the Transcript newsroom on Monday. The North Dakota Department of Health had reported that a woman in her 80s residing in Eddy County had died with COVID-19. The novel coronavirus had knocked on the door of our rural county all spring and summer, but it hadn’t breached its way into the living room until just a few weeks ago. It wasn’t bad enough that roughly one out every 100 of our residents had been fighting the virus at the same time (a high of 21 active cases were reported on Saturday, Sept. 5). Now, someone from our little community had died after testing positive for the virus, which put the game plan for the pandemic on a whole new playing field.

Then on Wednesday, two more deaths were reported in Eddy County, another woman in her 80s and a man in his 80s, both with underlying health conditions. We were faced with the reality of not only the county’s first death, but a trio of local lives lost in just a few days from a virus that has claimed nearly 200,000 lives nationally since March.

We are all human, and we all deal with death differently. I’m not a person who handles death particularly well anyway, and this concept of finding the right words to put a pandemic into perspective while honoring the dead is keeping me up at night.

As a member of this community first, and a “journalist” or “hard news reporter” second, I aim to approach this timely topic with care, compassion and respect for those affected so greatly by this virus.

You see, I don't want these members of our community to become mere statistics the state gathers to measure the impact of this disease— or worse yet the subject of social media banter about who's not doing enough to slow the spread or stop the virus from taking more lives.

These people aren’t just a number on a chart, they are our friends, family members, next-door neighbors and fellow citizens. They represent a piece of our community, a part of the social fabric of Eddy County.

Readers, I need your help. If someone you know and love has died with COVID-19, I want to hear from you. This is your story to tell, and I will willingly tell it in your words. After all, newspapers at their core are the recorders of history, and this pandemic is historic, powerful and impactful.

Just as I perused the archives from 1918 to understand how Spanish influenza impacted Eddy County, I anticipate that many years from now another publisher will seek out the 2020 archives to get some perspective on how our community was altered by this pandemic. Yes, it’s important to be factual and timely, but I want to report more than just facts, figures and charts.

As all this has unfolded and is far from over, I have tried to take an adage to heart. It is better to ask not, “why is this happening to me?”, but rather to ask “what is this teaching me?” Yes, this pandemic can be a reminder of how important kindness, compassion and respect are if we want to have a thriving society.