This week marked the fiftieth week that I’ve focused most of my writing energies on my little running blog here on the COVID-19 pandemic. 5-0.

Fifty is a milestone in and of itself — how many of us, at the very beginning of all of this, imagined that life would be what it is, fifty weeks later??? — but it has been within the past few days that our country has also surpassed the tragic, unfathomable, gutting half-million COVID deaths mark.

5-0-0-0-0-0.  

It’s hard to conceive what that means or signifies. The NYT’s front page tries: 

There’s a lot to say, a lot that can be said, about … this.

At the same time, though, where do you even begin, and what more can be said, echoed, blasted, that we haven’t already?

Nothing can bring these people back.

No act of heroism, nor fancy series of words or elaborate grammar constructions, can return to these victims’ families he/she/they whom they lost in the past fifty weeks.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.