Which lives we protect and how depends ultimately on which deaths we pay attention to: if ten passenger planes went down tomorrow, for example, all airlines would be grounded. But during the Covid years we came to tolerate an equivalent death toll on a random winter Wednesday. If Al Qaeda sent roving bands of hit squads into nursing homes to live stream the murder of seniors, our societal response would be, I think it’s fair to say, significantly more strenuous, heated, and focused than our collective response to deaths on this scale from an invisible virus happening behind closed doors and
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