On the National Mall in Washington D.C. workers are placing small white flags for each life lost to COVID-19. As a country we have surpasses 700,000 deaths. No single image of the field of flags can convey the enormity of the loss.
I tried to figure out how to that large a number in a single image. I thought how many dots did Georges Pierre Seurat use to finish one of his large pointillist paintings like the La Grande Jatte? No one knows there are too many dots to count.
Then I wondered how many pixels are in one of my digital paintings? I realized I could create a canvas with just over 700,000 pixels and this image is the result.
What would 700,000 people look like lying head to toe and shoulder to shoulder? If each person was 6 feet tall then one side of the image would be 5,028 feet long, or almost 17 football fields.
If you look at just a small detail of the image you can see that each star consists of about 9 pixels and each square of the large pill is maybe 20 pixels wide.
The display of flags at the National Mall came to an end on October 4, 2021 after being in place for two weeks. Artist Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg created the installation. Some who visited the installation were able to write the name of their loved one on a flag.
Merck and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics announced on October 1, 2021 early results that indicate their experimental oral antiviral drug molnupiravir might reduce the risk of death or hospitalization from Covid-19 by half. This could be a game changer to save lives but hey, we thought having free vaccines would be a game changer. In a news release, the company said 7.3% of 385 patients who received the antiviral were either hospitalized or died from Covid-19, compared with 14.1% of the 377 patients who received a placebo, which does nothing. In countries that are desperately waiting for vaccines this could save lives. The anti viral would not be a replacement for vaccines but another tool to help stop deadly outcomes.
“This is the most impactful result that I remember seeing of an orally available drug in the treatment of a respiratory pathogen, perhaps ever,” Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Friday.