By the end of the week, Mississippi will likely reach a grim milestone: 10,000 COVID-19 deaths since the first Mississippian, a Hancock County man, died of the virus on March 19, 2020.

Total COVID-19 cases in Mississippi eclipsed the 500,000-mark on Tuesday.

That means one of every 300 Mississippians has died of COVID-19 during that past 19 months and one of every six Mississippians has contracted the virus.

These milestones are not likely to generate much discussion. A shooting on the Southside will send citizens into a social media frenzy, filling up discussion boards with demands that “something must be done” with little concern about what measures might be taken. “Whatever it takes” is the prevailing sentiment.

Yet the fact that Mississippi has the highest COVID-19 death rate in the entire country seems to be taken with a grain of salt and even a mild suggestion that something be done, evokes a deafening chorus of, blind, unreasoning, uncaring opposition.

When Soviet madman Joseph Stalin said, “The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic,” the civilized world was horrified.

Now, all these decades later, across the country and particularly in Mississippi, Stalin’s observation appears to have been validated.

Stalin was right.

Now, the only question is why?

Psychologists began studying this phenomenon when it was clear that people were losing interest in COVID-19, even as it continued to surge across the globe. Analytics showed online searches for “COVID-19” and “pandemic” began to sharply decrease in December.

One theory to explain the indifference to the staggering death tolls is something psychologists call “psychic numbing,” which argues that there reaches a point when the emotional impact of a death declines as the number of deaths increase.

We never learned the identity of the Hancock County man who was the first Mississippian to die of COVID nor the identity of the first COVID-19 death in the Golden Triangle, which occurred on April 5, 2020.

But those deaths shook us because COVID-19 was no longer an abstract, something that happened to other people in other places. It spurred us to action, both individually and as communities. Face masks disappeared from store shelves overnight. Some women began sewing face masks and giving them out to friends, family and neighbors. We accepted precautions, up to and including shuttering businesses and wearing masks, with only a smattering of dissent, even at a time when COVID-19 cases were relatively few and deaths rare.

But as cases and deaths moved from the 10s to 100s to 1000s, our resolve did not strengthen. In fact, dissent grew almost in direct opposite proportion to the increasing toll.

At some point, what we first perceived as a personal threat and a tragedy became simply numbers. It was just too much to process.

When Mississippi crosses that 10,000 dead threshold, there will be little empathy. We won’t see their faces or recognize their humanity. We won’t pause to consider the loss that each of those deaths represent. We won’t mourn. Certainly, we won’t be moved to demand that “something be done.”

We’ve grown weary, even bored. We want to pretend that everything is normal, which allows us to resume our old routines, consequences be damned.

I wonder if anything ever again can inspire us to unite in empathy and conviction to “do something” when disaster strikes.

Mass shootings come and go, scarcely noted. There is no moral outcry, no effort to intervene.

Natural disasters do not evoke serious discussion about how these events can be reduced or mitigated.

We have lost a sense of what it means to be a society, dependent on one another, willing to sacrifice even in small ways for the benefit of people we don’t know.

“Who is my neighbor?” the lawyer asked Jesus.

We don’t like his answer, so we ignore it and this is especially true of His followers, I think.

No, we will care for and support only those in our small circle.

When was the last time our governor, our mayors, our city council or board members even mentioned the vast scale of suffering? When was the last time the prayer offered at the beginning of our city governments made even a passing note of our COVID-19 dead?

More people in our community will die from COVID-19, but we seem well past the point of caring all that much.

Stalin’s observation may prove to be an underestimation.

Not even one death is a tragedy.

Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].

Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].