It began with one dot. Then it grew to nearly half a million. A graphic on Sunday’s front page depicts the totality of Covid’s devastation in the country.
the totality of Covid’s devastation in the country.
Credit…The New York Times
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From afar, the graphic on the front page of Sunday’s New York Times looks like a blur of gray, a cloudy gradient that slowly descends into a block of solid ink. Up close, it shows something much darker: close to 500,000 individual dots, each representing a single life lost in the United States to the coronavirus, signifying a staggering milestone that the nation is reaching in just under 12 months.
A version of the graphic was originally published online in late January, when U.S. Covid-19 deaths hit 425,000 after four of the deadliest weeks of the pandemic in the United States. Lazaro Gamio and Lauren Leatherby, both graphics editors at The Times, plotted out the points so they stretched chronologically down a long scroll, from the first reported U.S. death nearly a year ago to the current toll of often thousands of casualties per day.
On Sunday, half of the front page was dedicated to the graphic, with nearly a half-million dots running down the length of the page and across three of its six columns. The prominent real estate in the print edition conveyed the significance of this moment in the pandemic and the totality of the devastation.
