Apr 28, 2020
updated Monday May 18, 2020
Visualizing the cost of COVID-19 in the US
It’s hard to visualize the cost that COVID-19 has already had. The designers of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial designed it partly as a tool for visualizing the same number of people.
The scale of it is sobering. That’s what the designers intended. “Fifty-eight thousand” is an abstraction, but the 58,320 names inscribed on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC are an overwhelming message about the cost of the war in Vietnam.
A memorial as a visualization tool
The memorial is so large that it’s difficult to photograph the entire thing. That’s part of the message. A mountain of names, where every one was a human life.
COVID-19 has claimed as many American lives. Now we’re trying to figure out how to count them, as we debate whether or not to count deaths from people who were believed to have had the coronavirus, like more than five thousand in New York. As the official death count gallops past fifty thousand, we can be certain that the number of American deaths has already exceeded the body count of the entire ten-year war in Vietnam. In only a few months.
Vietnam’s COVID-19 response
That brings us to today’s Vietnam, during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The impact of COVID-19 in Vietnam is a striking counterexample from the US. Vietnam has not recorded a single death from COVID-19, since their first recorded case on January 24.[1] At the start of the crisis, Vietnam promptly started a system of testing, tracing, and isolating cases. When the number of cases began to increase, they also closed their borders. The country’s military, entire public sector, and media industry all worked together to coordinate an early two-week precautionary social-distancing campaign. Vietnam began to lift restrictions on April 23.[2]
The pandemic is not over for them yet, but they have bought themselves precious time and used it well, and at least until now they have limited the impact. Vietnam’s response to COVID-19 has perhaps been the most successful of any country in the world, so far.
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Don’t treat the center line of the IHME forecast charts as a precise prediction, any more than you would assume that a hurricane will follow the center line on the NHC hurricane forecast cone images. The forecast is a wide range, not a specific number.
