Unlike other natural catastrophes or terrorism, the victims of coronavirus have mostly remained anonymous and faceless (something I've mentioned several times) because they serve no nationalist purpose. This (short) essay gets to the heart of this tragedy https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katherinemiller/coronavirus-deaths-obituaries-victims-covid-loss?bftwnews&utm_term=4ldqpgc#4ldqpgc

The Corona dead interpellate us in regards to the kind of system we live in. While the victims of terrorism or catastrophe can be instrumentalized to advance a nationalist narrative, the victims of Corona are a testament of the failures of capitalism.

If you die during this pandemic, you won't even be a statistic. The disposability of human life has been stretched to the point that you are not even a number because it makes the country "look bad".

I used to insist on "the logic of the spreadsheet" as the foundation on which the necropolitical rests but this pandemic is forcing me to revise this, to bring more granularity into this notion because the spreadsheet is adjusted to serve the nationalist narrative

and I insist in case anyone is new to my TL, I am not claiming the all the deaths are inevitable. However, the conditions under which these deaths occur, who is mostly affected (poor, PoC, elderly homes, health workers etc etc): all of these were preventable factors

the "death demographic" (if we can call it that) is a snapshot of the material conditions that create this vulnerability of life. The virus is the opposite of an equalizer. It has brought to the forefront and given visibility to the tiers in which humanity is assigned/ valued