#alongwalk

Jill Scott - A Long Walk

How far can you walk in a day? How about an hour? When I was younger and in better health I could easily walk 4 miles in an hour, but let’s just say the average for people is about 3 miles an hour.

Let’s say for the sake of convenience that we round our numbers a bit as we go along. According to the cdc, the current death count in the US is 131,065. That’s a bit lower than most counts, but let’s be cautious. Let’s say the average height of a person is 5′10″ (yes I know it is more than that - rounding numbers remember), which equals out to 70 inches a person.

Now if you laid out every dead American who is a victim of Covid-19 head to foot you’d end up with a figure roughly 145 miles long. (131,065 x 70″ / 63,360 (in. in a mile)). That’s just about the distance between Philadelphia and Washington DC. If the average person was walking without stopping, it would take them just over two days to walk that entire length. Considering armies generally only marched about twenty miles a day during the classical period, it would take on average about a week for that army to march that far. Imagine that, an entire week of walking along a trail made up of the bodies laid end to end of your countrymen.

This is the scope of the dead so far. It hasn’t even been five months yet, and we are seeing the largest spikes in cases every single day now (more than 50k yesterday alone). If we are looking at a 5% fatality rate that is another 2500 people who are going to die just from yesterday’s cases. Some experts are saying we could top 100k cases a day. That’s another 5k dead a day. If it goes on for just a month at that rate it will be 20k more dead than we have now (5k x 30 days - 130k).