Words Matter When Lives Are Lost

I’m angry, not at illness itself, but at the careless way it is being reported, as if the devastation of the last pandemic can be flattened into a comparison, a statistic, a fleeting headline.

The headlines these last few days, comparing this winter flu to Covid, feel frantic, careless, and detached from the reality so many people lived through. Words like “spike in numbers,” “wear your mask,” and even those faded “Keep 2 Metres Apart” signs on pavements are not just phrases. They are echoes of grief, reminders of people who didn’t get to come home, and fragments of lives irreversibly changed.

When illness is discussed as if it mirrors that time, it risks erasing the reality of what was lost. It wasn’t just routines, pay, or stability. People lost human beings. Entire worlds disappeared behind hospital doors. Families were broken in ways they will carry forever. And for those of us who survived, who lived through isolation, fear, and uncertainty, the memory never truly leaves.

With my own personal journey with grief, I’ve found that it does not ebb and flow in neat “waves.” It is constant. A quiet presence that sits beside you until something, a memory, a song, a word, or, in this case, a headline, a statistic, a careless comparison, pulls it forward again, sharp and unbidden.

Sometimes all it takes is a smell: the sharp sting of hand sanitiser, the antiseptic whiff of a shop, the sight of faded “Keep 2 Metres Apart” signs still clinging to pavements. “Wear your mask,” said casually on the news. These small fragments drag the past into the present in ways most people will never understand.

And yet reporting continues, often with a tone that seems almost flippant, as if comparing flu and Covid is clever. But for families who lost loved ones, who walked endless corridors of isolation, and still do, those who never got to say goodbye, these comparisons are careless. They flatten real human experience into numbers. They ignore grief that never ended when the pandemic did.

What hurts most is the desensitisation. Stories can be filed, shared on social media, and forgotten, but the grief of real people does not vanish. Loss does not end when the news moves on. Careless words can reopen wounds that were never truly allowed to close.

All I ask is that reporting could be gentler. That the language used reflects human lives, not just statistics. That it considers that some people did not get to celebrate the end of a lockdown, did not get to reclaim what was lost. That it leaves space for memory, mourning, and genuine empathy.

Let us stay kind, and sensitive to those still living with absence.

With all my empathy,

Chloe