Maeve Higgins: Individual death is never an isolated event

Dr Joseph Varon hugs and comforts a patient in the Covid-19 intensive care unit (ICU) during Thanksgiving at the United Memorial Medical Center on November 26, 2020 in Houston, Texas. Picture: Go Nakamura/Getty Images

Over one million people have died from coronavirus in the US. This week, the CDC, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, reported that the death toll had just surpassed one million people since March of 2020. 

Such a number is difficult to comprehend. The scale and speed of death are what researchers call a mortality shock. There are various gruesome ways to try to understand the scale of death. It's roughly equivalent to the entire population of San Francisco dying within two years or two Boeing 747s crashing every week for two years and killing everyone on board.