The "Covid Death" Reckoning [Published April 2023]

My analysis of some of the newly-released covid-19 data from New York State and New York City's 2020 vital statistics reports

We hunt the cause of ruin, add,
Subtract, and put ourselves in pawn;
For all our scratching on the pad,
We cannot trace the error down.

—From “The Reckoning” by Theodore Roetke