What Will Be The Lasting Image Of The Coronavirus Pandemic?

By Yvonne Sam
Contributing Columnist

When accidents happen, murderers strike or a natural disaster rushes up on us, there are certain images we remember, pictures we recognize. Our minds wrap very easily around them, and there are pictures that we instantly recognize. We say yes, this is what that is; we know what this is.

Yellow tape tells of a crime scene — cops standing in the street, near a sheet-covered body, people standing around weeping, tells of murder. The impromptu shrine of teddy bears and balloons speaks of a murdered child.

The picture of items, washed ashore, or torn lumber, speak of storms or hurricanes. After terrorists strike, there comes images of smoke and people running, helter-skelter, and police lights flashing. These are, in no way, abstractions.

As we sit in our homes, waiting out Covid-19, remaining in place, so as not to infect others, or ourselves, we become isolated, detached, and live our virtual lives on our screens, in our isolation and detachment, are abstract.

The big cities and the empty spaces, graphs of numbers of the infected and dead, from various parts of the Diaspora; mayors, governors, politicians and presidents holding briefings and discussing their plans; doctors, medical heads, surgeon-generals detailing the course of the virus. And, as always, we see images of people in masks, maintaining their social distance, surreptitious and anonymous. News videos of the hauntingly-empty spaces in some places, are particularly scary.

It is the lack of a common archetypal image that makes processing the coronavirus so difficult, for many of us. The multiple deaths in the hospitals and nursing homes are not abstract. But we do not see them. These are isolated, private deaths, in fact, so private that their loved ones cannot be near.

The victims of the coronavirus succumb to the illness surrounded by gloved hands and masked strangers, with not even a priest to administer the last rites, or hear a confession at the end.

Subsequently, from some place, external to the place of death, a public official or governmental representative offers pro forma condolences and reads out the numbers of the dead and infected.

Now there is something that is not abstract, something that we can wrap our brains around. I noticed it in the news photo of some American Covid centers — a picture of a truck. It was parked outside of a hospital in New York City — a refrigerated truck — with the back doors open, like a wide mouth waiting to be fed.

Will this be the representative image of the coronavirus?

It was my sincere hope that the iconic image of the pandemic would be something uplifting, such as a candle, lit against the darkness.

I mulled over the death rates, worldwide, with my thoughts coming slowly to rest, on the toll in America, especially New York. Then I thought about those trucks outside hospitals. You do not need to see the cargo, for we already know what is in there, wrapped in cloth and plastic, and irrevocably still.

FEMA has deployed refrigerator trucks to serve as makeshift morgues in New York City. Multiple white refrigerator trucks have been seen lining the street, near a medical facility in Chicago.

There is absolutely nothing abstract about a refrigeration truck. It does not exist in some negative space. It is heavy, dense, real. We know what it is, and we know what it says to us: this is coronavirus.