"An Incalculable Loss": Revisiting The New York Times List of Coronavirus Dead

My 2024 assessment of The Crown Jewel of Pandemic-Substantiation Propaganda

On May 24, 2020, The New York Times published a dramatic, visually-arresting front page proclaiming U.S. DEATHS NEAR 100,000, AN INCALCULABLE LOSS and followed by names of dead Americans who were reportedly felled by a novel coronavirus.

One thousand names, to be exact, of people from 46 states and Puerto Rico who had died between February through mid-May 2020 and were presented as “micro-obituaries” across four pages.

Dan Barry wrote a brief introduction to the list and a companion essay, “The Human Loss.” An online version placed the obituaries and prose amidst 100,000 human silhouettes.

I revisited "An Incalculable Loss” as part of my ongoing inquiry into the New York City mass casualty event of spring 2020.¹ My analysis of its key features, content, purpose, and effect follows. I highlight the

• Vague and misleading headline

• Imprecise terms for the virus and disease

• Strategic use of war imagery and language

• Endorsement of unconstitutional, unethical, and immoral policies

• Unsubstantiated claims refuted or unsupported by evidence

• Mystery methods for selecting obituaries

Vague & Misleading Headline

A strong headline can be read and understood, even in isolation from the date, mashed, or body of the article. The bold, all-caps italics of The New York Times May 24th headline insist that something very important involving 100,000 deaths and “incalculable loss” has occurred. Yet no cause or event is specified or alluded to.

Consider what the NYT doesn’t say:

• U.S. VIRUS DEATHS NEAR 100,000.

• U.S. COVID DEATHS NEAR 100,000.

• U.S. PANDEMIC DEATHS NEAR 100,000.

Choosing front-page headlines on a slow news day involves deliberation and debate. For that reason, it’s hard to believe the vague language for a monumental memorial is unintentional.

Using “100,000” as a death milestone was absolutely intentional.

It’s the lowest possible six-digit number and much higher than the population of most U.S. towns/cities. Dan Barry explains the significance with a dose of nostalgia :

“One hundred thousand. A threshold number. It is the number celebrated when the family’s odometer ticks once more to reach the six digits. It is the number of residents that can make a place feel fully like a city: San Angelo, Texas; Kenosha, Wisconsin; Vacaville, California. So imagine a city of 100,000 residents that was here for New Year’s Day but has not been wiped from the American map.” (p. 12)

Note that there is no context for a normal number of deaths. Even the most highly-educated reader doesn’t necessarily know a typical year in the U.S. sees 1.2 million deaths between January and May. In Barry’s terms, that’s twelve cities’ worth “wiped from the map” — not because of a new disease but because people don’t live forever and death is a fact of life. There’s no way of knowing whether the 100,000 deaths being memorialized - or the 1,000 deaths listed - were people who were statistically-scheduled to die. Such context is critical, unless your goal is to sell the public on a deadly pandemic.

As if blasting a Big Scary Number untethered from an event, cause, or frame of reference weren’t bad enough, the number of names actually printed is only 1% of what the headline implies. The introduction states this clearly, but the casual reader is left with the impression that the venerable New York Times has substantiated 100,000 deaths from a coronavirus.

No Mention of the Specific Virus/Disease

Like other mass media reports & government communications at the time, “Incalculable Loss” doesn’t use the terms announced by the WHO on February 11, 2020: SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19. The introduction and essay stick to coronavirus and virus:

• the impact of the coronavirus (front page)

• deaths attributed to the virus (front page)

• people in the United States who have died from the coronavirus (page 12)

• the coronavirus dead (page 14)

• virus-related or not (page 14)

• Why has the virus claimed (page 14)

Arguably, SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 are clunky for typesetting and readability. May 24th still seems late in the “first wave” to be so indefinite and raises the question of whether journalists were explicitly told or directed to use a generic term, and why.

Strategic Use of War Imagery & Language

Few things are better for a newspaper’s bottom line than a war. (A line delivered by Joseph Pulitzer character’s in the musical Newsies comes to mind, “Whoever said ‘war is hell’ wasn’t trying to sell newspapers.”)

The idea of being at “war” with a coronavirus pervaded U.S. officials’ language and the media’s framing soon after an emergency was declared. For example, on March 15th, New York governor Andrew Cuomo said, "We are looking at a new war that no one has seen before. This is a case of first impression for this nation. We have never fought a virus like this with this potential consequence.”²

Three days later, a reporter asked President Donald Trump, “Do you consider to America to be on a wartime footing with this virus?”

Trump responded, “I do. I actually do. I’m looking at it that way because, you know, if — if it got out of control — the big thing we did was a very early stoppage of people coming in who could be very, very heavily infected…. I view it as a, in a sense, a wartime president. I mean, that’s what we’re fighting.”

The print edition of “Incalculable Loss” resembles wartime newspaper list of dead, wounded, and missing soldiers — like this August 4, 1861 New York Tribune for the Battle of Bull Run.³

The effective was comparable, with “Incalculable Loss” published on Memorial Day weekend and reinforcing the idea that the nation had just experienced a bloody battle.⁴

Barry’s “Human Toll” essay is also evocative of war. Phrases like immensity of the sudden toll, absence of any clear end, and even the dead have to wait suggest that an unexpected invasion has occurred.

He makes two direct comparisons that imply the previous nine weeks are worse than a war:

For now, all we can do is hold our collective breath, inch toward some approximation of how things were - and try to process a loss of life greater than what the country incurred in several decades of war, from Vietnam to Iraq.

Even in the horrible times of wars and hurricanes and terrorist attacks that seemed to crumble the ground beneath our getting, we at least had time-tested ways of grieving that helped us take that first hesitant step. Not now.

Such attempts at equivalence are unwarranted, if not a brand of yellow journalism.

The average age on the NYT list of 1,000 deaths is 77; over half were age 80+. Dead soldiers are young; the life-years lost is high, as is the fallout for soldiers who are wounded or survive the trauma of battle.

No observable, physical reality in the nine weeks following a pandemic declaration kept people from gathering to grieve. There was no natural disaster and no documented terrorist attack. Towns were not bombed, rebel forces did not invade cities, and graveyards, funeral homes, and crematoriums were not destroyed.

Yet Mr. Barry spends a few paragraphs describing and implicitly justifying the suspension of funerals and in-person grieving rituals.⁵ He seems wholly unaware - or unwilling to admit - that domestic tyranny, not foreign invaders or necessity, denied people the right to mourn together and corporately bury their loved ones.

The real war was psychological, waged by government & media against We the People — not epidemiological, waged by a virus.

Endorsement of Unconstitutional, Unethical, and Immoral Policies

Public officials likely treated the spring of 2020 like a war because war is one of the very few emergencies that might compel temporary suspension of certain activities. Even then, abandoning or ignoring civil liberties, fundamental rights, and basic human decency is never justified.

That concept was not on the NYT radar, with Barry’s essay tacitly endorsing the unconstitutional, unethical, and immoral policies.

He couched locked-down nursing homes, visitors banned from healthcare settings, disrupted jobs, and shuttered restaurants & places of worship as the work of the virus, rather than of decisions made by authorities.

“This highly contagious virus,” Barry wrote, “has forced us to suppress our nature as social creatures, for fear that we might infect or be infected.”

Humans fearing the specter of disease & death is predictable and historically precedented. Neither a virus nor the detection, naming, and mass-testing thereof, forces ‘us’ or ‘we’ to do anything.

I was not afraid of infecting someone else or being infected myself - and I was not alone. My inclination was to leave my house with my face, movements, and speech unfettered, and live my life normally. I saw no emergency.

Many Americans were afraid and either believed or wanted to believe an emergency existed. This came as no surprise considering The Feds & The Fourth Estate willingly and intentionally stoked fear in the populace by pretending the fate of lives and livelihoods was contingent on obeying illegal mass quarantine orders. Federal and state communicable disease codes were broken many times over, as legislators, lawyers, and judges abandoned their posts. Most religious and school leaders were no better and quickly ceded authority to those who were clearly breaking the law, both God’s and Man’s.

Mr. Barry would have posterity believe the populace was powerless and the virus at the pulpit, deciding and directing what could and couldn’t be done. This notion was absurd in spring 2020 and is even more absurd now.

Unsubstantiated Claims Refuted or Unsupported by Evidence

Six claims made in Barry’s essay were and/or are unsubstantiated by evidence.

• The [corona]virus struck suddenly (“sudden toll”). Viruses are not bombs. Moreover, a “spreading” deadly pathogen would not wait for mass testing or government orders to begin manifesting itself in the number of deaths occurring each day. It would show up as a signal, whether in particular causes, age groups, or places of death. Even something new-on-the scene and merely risk-additive to some groups would show itself in hospital data or emergency calls. We see nothing of the kind in any data anywhere and are expected to believe a dangerous virus was nowhere…until it was everywhere — which makes no epidemiological sense.

• The [corona]virus is “highly contagious.” As far as I know, person-to-person spread of SARS-CoV-2 (if that’s the virus Mr. Barry is referring to) has never been demonstrated, only inferred.⁶

• Hospitals were “jam-packed”. If there was a jam-packed hospital during these weeks, I have yet to find it. Emergency department visits tanked nationwide. Bed occupancy at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, New York - the so-called “Epicenter of the Epicenter” - was well within historical norms and dropped precipitously in late April 2020. The NYT aided and abetted the overrun hospital system narrative, most notoriously with an early frenzied report about Elmhurst, so Mr. Barry was at least consistent with those tales.

• Many people died “in subdivided city apartments, too sick or too scared to go to a hospital, their closest relatives a half-world away.” I interpret this as an allusion to New York City’s high home death toll in particular. No doubt some people avoided hospitals and doctors, because they were told to stay home, save lives. But New York City Emergency Medical Services data show a sudden rise in 911 calls and ambulance dispatches when the federal government proclaimed “15 Days to Slow the Spread”. Meanwhile, there was a drop in ambulances transporting patients, a spike in refusals of medical aid, and a massive increase in cardiac-arrest deaths that has not been fully explained. The NYT may not have had access to complete data at the time, but there wasn’t a basis for blaming fear alone. Even if there were, media outlets such as the NYT played an outsize role in promoting that fear.

• The virus attacked Blacks and Latinos at disproportionate rates. Barry’s claim that Blacks and Latinos were overrepresented in deaths attributed to “the virus” is correct, but the implication that Blacks and Latinos are necessarily more susceptible to infection - or to being killed by an attacking virus - is not rooted in evidence. An early study comparing “hot spots” in New York City and Chicago found that case rates were higher working-class Hispanic neighborhoods, whereas in Chicago rates were higher among in poor Blacks neighborhoods. Incidence was somewhat associated with number of people in a household, but not with neighborhood density. In fairness, Barry posed his claim as a question and rightly predicted such questions would be “asked for decades to come.”Further study of who was likely to be tested (and why) and demographics of each city’s “damaged ships” and similar factors is needed.

• Nursing homes were devastated. U.S. nursing homes and long-term care facilities did experience a 24% increase in deaths from all causes by the end of May 2020, a rise lower than the increase in hospitals (37%) and at home (39%). Barry avoids directly linking the virus to “the nursing home devastation” — which is more than can be said of subsequent explanations that scapegoat a pathogen for deaths likely to have been caused neglect and unnecessary transfers of residents into hospitals. Incredibly, there is still no data on how many care residents total died in those weeks, because there is no source that reports resident deaths irrespective of place of death.

Mystery Method for Selecting Obituaries

The geographical and age distribution of the names chosen for the NYT list of 1,000 coronavirus deaths appears more methodical than described in articles explaining how list was compiled.

According to an NYT article published on May 23, 2020, staff researcher Alain Delaquérière “combed through various sources online for obituaries and death notices with Covid-19 written as the cause of death” and put together a list of 1,000 names from different newspapers. An editorial team and several graduate student journalists read them and “gleaned phrases that depicted the uniqueness of each life lost”

In a National Press Club interview a few days later, NYT assistant graphics editor Simone Landon indicated that more staffers than Delaquérière were involved in collecting 1,500 or so obituaries, from which the 1,000 were selected:

“We started by trying to gather as many obituaries and paid death notices as we could in the time we had. We searched news reference sites like Factiva and Nexis and the obituary site Legacy.com for mentions of deaths related to coronavirus and did some more targeted searching on the sites of certain news outlets. Some of the names came from another project in the Times, Those We’ve Lost, and from paid death notices that appeared in the Times. A huge amount of the research credit belongs to Alain Delaquérière, a veteran in the Times research department. We also searched in Spanish-language and Chinese-language media for obituaries or articles about those who died. 

We probably collected about 1,500 obituaries in the end, but some were duplicates (usually more prominent people who were covered in multiple outlets) or the details were difficult to confirm. We wanted to use as many as we could, even when there wasn’t a lot of information about the person to go on.”

As to whether representation from different states was sought, Landon said, “We did try for some geographic diversity, though we also kept in mind where the outbreaks were worst, so many people were from the New York area, Chicago and Washington state.”

Geographic Distribution

Which states and cities are represented on the list - and to what extent?

Figure 1 below shows

• ~80% of the names are from 14 states

• ~50% of the names are from only 5 states

• ~40% of the names are from two states (NY and NJ)

• ~20% of the names are from NY state alone

• One name from Puerto Rico (a U.S. territory)

• No names from Arkansas, West Virginia, Alaska, or Wyoming.

Figure 1

Specific cities aren’t listed with all names, but New York City is the highest frequency among those that do (n=94),⁷ followed by Chicago (n=39).⁸

How does this compare to geographic distribution of deaths that attributed underlying cause to COVID-19?

Figure 3 below shows finalized federal data through May 2020, with the five boroughs of New York City from New York State, the other 49 states, and Washington, D.C. Eyeballing this graph versus the list graph suggests the NYT may have used provisional COVID-19 death numbers or a data dashboard (e.g., their own, Johns Hopkins University’s) at the time and attempted proportionality.

Figure 2

Nearly 20% of all deaths that attributed COVID-19 as underlying cause were New York City residents. This means New York City is underrepresented on the NYT list, despite being substantially overrepresented in the national count.⁹

Figure 3 shows each jurisdiction’s COVID-19 deaths as a percentage of the January through May 2020 total (black bars) compared to each jurisdiction’s deaths on the NYT list as percentage of that total (blue bars).¹⁰

Figure 3

Like New York City, the states of New Jersey and Texas are underrepresented on the NYT list; Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Iowa are overrepresented.¹¹

The overrepresentation of Iowa is unexpected but might be explained by a) the quality, specificity, or availability of obituaries in newspapers there, and/or b) a desire to show that middle America wasn’t safe from coronavirus.

Age Distribution

Neither of the articles about how the NYT staff created the list mentioned if a certain age group distribution was approximated.

Figure 4 shows that 70% percent of the decedents on the list were over age 70. Half (51%) were over age 80. The youngest death list is 5-year-old years old Skylar Herbert of Detroit, Michigan. The oldest death is Luther Coleman of Evergreen Park, Illinois, who was 108.

Figure 4

Because this distribution is similar to the U.S. age group distribution of all deaths in 2019, it seems that either a) the NYT used the normal profile as a guideline, or b) deaths blamed on a coronavirus follow the same pattern as deaths from any cause.

Since 8,000 people die each day in the United States, the list of 1,000 deaths may make for a shocking display but it is not evidence of an outbreak or pandemic. In truth, most towns and counties didn’t experience high excess death in these weeks - or even much increase in death at all.

Whatever the methods, the decedents selected for the NYT list were chosen with a purpose in mind: Persuade readers that America was experiencing a devastating disease-spread event and needed new treatments, including a shot.

2024 Takeaways

“An Incalculable Loss” is a prime example of early 2020 pandemic-affirming propaganda from a newspaper that has long considered itself “the complete newspaper of record” and showcase for All the News That’s Fit to Print.

It’s hard to say whether and to what extent the list impacted the way people were thinking at the time. Most Americans probably didn’t see the list when it was published. Elites and influencers may be a different story.

During a conversation with

Jonathan Engler

and me last year, Naomi Wolf (a New Yorker) appears to be referencing the Times’ list:

Jonathan Engler [25:00]: …just to correct something that you said, if you don’t mind, Naomi. You gave the impression that we have access to some kind of anonymized roll calls of the people who died [in New York City]. We don’t even have that. It’s not like you said, some numbers replacing names. All we have are totals on spreadsheets.

Naomi Wolf: That’s not okay. The New York Times has more than that, right, at a state level? They have datasets where each individual purportedly has a line. So that’s really a smoking gun there, because you really can’t check line by line. You can’t check that this individual who was said to have died in Queens on March 22nd matches an individual, matches a death in Queens, right? So interesting.

Assuming that Ms. Wolf was referring to the May 24, 2020 list, she seems to have had the impression that the most famous newspaper in the nation had independently verified a death event. I suspect other people in the U.S. and around the world had or have the same impression from the list .

My takeaways from a 2024 look-back at “An Incalculable Loss” follow:

• The print and online editions of “An Incalculable Loss” are statistically, socially, psychologically, and politically deceptive. They marked the close of the spring 2020 death events and affirmed the government’s claims about a public health emergency involving a deadly spreading pathogen.¹²

• There is no proof that all, most, or any of the 1,000 deaths on the list were due to coronavirus and/or SARS-CoV-2 infection.

• Decedents from New York City are underrepresented on the list, relative to how many COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. during the timeframe occurred there.

• The list is an insufficient source for substantiating the New York City mass casualty event. Only 94 names on the list were New York City residents.

Finally, as a serious analyst who has asserted that New York City’s spring 2020 death curve is false — which therefore renders the U.S. curve false —my message to The New York Times is this:

The loss is calculable and might not be what you think.

---

A PDF of the pages from the May 24, 2020 print edition and a spreadsheet of the names are appended below. I invite readers to review both, make their own observations, and verify the names & deaths.

Nyt 52420 Incalcuable Loss

4.41MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Nyt May 24, 2020 Issue Mass

18.1KB ∙ XLSX file

Download

Download

Send data and typo corrections to WoodHouseSub@proton.me

1. Thanks to Dialectics, not debates for a PDF of the print edition and an Excel file of the obituaries, and to

Mr Law, Health and Technology

for another Excel file of the list.

2. It was Andrew Cuomo’s press conference performances as a “wartime governor” which earned him a Tony Award. He repeatedly justified decisions and made demands under the banner of being at war with the virus, i.e., “We have to treat it like a war here in New York." (March 19, 2020) and “The president said it’s a war. It is a war! Well then act like it’s a war!” (March 24, 2020). Donald Trump and others did too.

3. NYT staff do not mention such war lists when describing the inspiration for the design (i.e., May 23, 2020 NYT article and May 26, 2020 National Press Club article).

4. NYT Assistant Editor Simone Landon claimed the Memorial Day weekend publication was a “somber coincidence,” saying, “We conceived the project to mark the grim milestone in coronavirus deaths, and it just happened to nearly coincide with Memorial Day.”

5. It is ironic that Mr. Barry spends so many words on trying to convince the reader that the suspension of wakes, funerals, shivas, etc. was an unavoidable sacrifice for the greater good, given that there is no proof that the city in which the NYT is headquartered experienced the excess-death equivalent of ten World Trade Center events in two and a half months.

6. e.g., the case study describing the first person-to-person transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in the U.S. likely was not an instance of person-to-person transmission and should be retracted.

7. For names that did not specify New York City or list a city in the state of New York, I used the original obituary and/or other sources to determine if the person lived in one of the five boroughs at time of death.

8. Other notable cities include Philly (n=10), Washington, D.C. (n=10); Detroit (n=7); Rochester, NY (n=6), Des Moines, IA (n=6), Cedar Rapids, IA (n=5), Hartford, CT (n=5).

9. Less than 3% of the U.S. population lives in a borough of New York City.

10. A potentially fairer contemporaneous comparison would use CDC provisional counts being reported as of mid-May 2020 but not necessarily change my speculation that NYT’s method was more directed by geographic distribution data that they suggested.

11. County analysis would likely show specific counties are represented in particular (NYC metro, Cook County, Boston area).

12. Notably, George Floyd died the following day, May 25th, switching the national focus from 100,000 deaths to 1 death.