Like Wikipedia, the New York Times keeps a list of COVID fatalities in its continuing “Those We’ve Lost” feature. Wikipedia’s metric for inclusion is whether the victim had already had a Wikipedia page, while the NYT picks people for its own reasons, including that they are notable for how young they died. So the latter is a more “curated” list than Wikipedia’s.
Even so, a look through the NYT’s photos is enlightening:
How many famous people who have died of COVID were still healthy and young enough to be in the primes of their careers?https://t.co/LtdV25kxCW
The NYT runs a “Those We’ve Lost” feature about all the famous people who have been struck down … but, on average:
A. They aren’t all that famous
B. Most were old and/or sickly and thus well-past their career primes:
For example, here’s the first name on the NYT’s list:
These databases of COVID deaths illustrate the patterns seen in statistics: this is a bad disease for the old, sickly, and obese, but it’s not exactly wiping out a rising generation of talent that would have contributed so much to America’s future if not for their dying young.
The NYT tries to put younger victims toward the top of its Those We’ve Lost list. One obvious pattern is that many seem overweight in their photos.
Why has there been so little push to get Americans to lower the risk of the virus by losing weight? After all, losing weight not only helps you not die of coronavirus, it helps you avoid diabetes, heart attacks, etc. etc. So why no weight loss promotion, especially compared to, say, the fanatic media effort this summer to uphold the sacred right of black criminals to resist arrest without anything bad happening to them, which, objectively speaking, might not seem quite as high of a national priority during a health crisis?
If the media scared 50 percent of Americans into losing 10 pounds to reduce their risk from COVID, that would likely increase life expectancy for the whole country on average more than the virus reduces it.
