A grim milestone .

Ever since the media started recorded Covid deaths there has been one particular piece of language that I have seen over and over again, ‘A grim milestone’.

It started around about the 10k mark and then has reappeared every time a new milestone has been approached. Be that 20k, 50k, 100k all the way to 350k in the US.

A quick look at Google Trends shows that the phrase barely existed before COVID but comes back whenever we hit another ‘grim milestone’. It’s not that writers are lazy, the term is correct. And there is so much writing on Covid that it’s inevitable phrases like this become widespread.

If you read writers like Umair Haque he will tell you that US deaths are going to reach around half a million. That was when they were at about 150k. I see no reason to doubt that based on current data. People accuse Umair of doomsaying but he’s got pretty much everything right.

So we are being forced to re-evaluate our notion of what a grim milestone is every day.

How grim is grim?