As of Wednesday afternoon, the United States as an official matter had lost 100,000 people to the coronavirus—100,000 people who are irreplaceable to someone else. This threshold was crossed without the large-scale acts of public mourning with which we typically observe mass death. The closest thing to it was the sobering front page of Sunday’s New York Times, which listed the names of 1,000 people who’d died of COVID-19 in the United States.