What does 1000 dead people actually look like?

The death toll reached over 1020 today in the uk and 15k deaths globally! .. but what does 1000 people actually look like? And why are we not seeing the magnitude of this natural disaster?

We hear a number every single day on the news!

Announced as ‘Breaking News’ about mid afternoon each day… and we read it and we sigh. We might state it out loud with a shake of our head and we might even comment on it. But are we really taking it in?

Reading comments and responses on social media makes it quite clear that many are not!

When have you ever seen a movement of everyday people responding to mass deaths of innocent people by providing a constant list of reasons why we shouldn’t be so bothered by it?

You just need to look at any daily announcement and read the comments .. dismissing the dead as ‘old’ , ‘having underlying health conditions’, or simply by stating these people didn’t exist at all!!!

When did we turn into a nation of people who respond to death with dismissal?

Are we all guilty becoming numb to the magnitude of it all? Perhaps because we can’t see it.

What two days of covid deaths in uk at the current rate look like as graves.

We don’t see rolling footage of people dying on mass with constant interviews from witnesses and loved ones like we would any other disaster. We only see individual, socially distant, calm interviews of the bereaved slotted in between video and reports of mps, speeches and schools. It’s all calmly reported and the vast amount of daily deaths just a side story. So it’s hardly surprising we aren’t getting this!

So what exactly do these numbers actually mean, what do they look like?

A thousand people is equivalent to 4 large planes crashing and killing everyone on board. It’s the equivalent to all the students of a large high school all dying in an explosion or an entire housing estate of residents dying of a chemical spill.

Hard to imagine these awful things happening but the numbers are the same so why do they seem so horrific in comparison to covid deaths? Deaths that aren’t one offs but are happening every single day!

Normally when our country suffers a tragedy that involves a mass death it very rarely includes the same kind of number we are seeing here.

The Hillsborough disaster took 96 lives, the Manchester bombing took 23, abroad the horrors of 9/11 took around 3000 lives. All shocking and horrendous one off events but if we compare how the public reacted to these events to how we are responding to the daily tally now, we are seeing a very different mood.