DEAR EDITOR:

Everyday the news media in this country serves up the daily dose of coronavirus statistics to update the total cases and deaths in the United States, and the totals are touted continually as being the highest in the world. The total numbers can’t be disputed. They are in fact very tragic and can be almost overwhelming, however, if you dig deeper into the numbers, a completely different picture becomes clear and raises plenty of concern over the extent of our country’s shutdown.

Through the use of information readily available online on the New York Times website, I compiled some very interesting numbers as of May 28:

Total cases in the United States stood at 1.7 million, with 101,635 deaths, a very grim number and the only number that you ever hear when the media talks about total deaths in this country. But, if you take the total number of deaths in New York City and its surrounding areas, New Jersey, Maryland, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Delaware, Washington D.C., and the Philadelphia area of Pennsylvania, you will find 57,385 deaths in just that area I like to call the Eastern Corridor.

I then used the numbers of people reported to have died in nursing homes, a much harder number to find due to reporting differences in each state, and adjusted the number so I wasn’t double counting deaths in that Eastern Corridor. That made a total of 75,171 deaths in the Eastern Corridor. That makes the grand total of deaths in the rest of the United States 26,464.

Also, if you add in the deaths just in the areas around Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Diego, adjusted again so as not to overlap statistics, you come up with a final tally of 17,742 for the entire rest of the United States.

I am in no way trying to denigrate the loss of life due to this virus. Each and every death is very tragic and a sad note to the COVID-19 outbreak that we all have had to endure. However, as you can see by just digging into the numbers, a very real picture becomes clear.

For the most part, if you don’t live in the Eastern Corridor, Chicago, Detroit, Southern California or in a nursing home, then you are pretty safe, statistically speaking. It also raises the question of why our leaders shut down the greatest economy in the history of the world. Couldn’t we have just shut down certain areas and practiced social distancing in the rest of the country?

GARY M. RUSSELL

Canfield