We officially passed 200,000 deaths to COVID-19 yesterday, more than any other country in the world.

The passing of the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg could put Obamacare in limbo, again, throwing millions off their health care in the midst of a pandemic.

Campus is across the country, continue to be a hotspot for COVID-19 transmission. This is America Dissected. I'm your host, Dr. Abdul-Lalze.

Every day, I start my day by looking at Johns Hopkins COVID-19 morbidity and mortality statistics. Every day, the numbers grow.

The ticker is like some morbid counting machine that keeps dialing up to some interminable infinity.

I have to remind myself that these numbers aren't just numbers. They're not some meaningless stat. Each and every one of them is somebody.

That somebody had people they loved, people who loved them. They smiled and laughed, held hands, cried tears and had dreams.

Each of them leaves people behind. 200,000 causes for thousands more holes left in the hearts of children and parents and lovers.

The challenges, though, is that the numbers have gotten so big that they obscure that human meaning.

If only one man dies, it's a tragedy. If millions die, that's only statistics. Joseph Stalin, the communist dictator of the USSR, said that about a famine.

Sadly, it's the brutal logic it seems Trump brings to this pandemic.

As that brutal counter continues to wind forward and we get more and more numb to the climbing toll of human death and destruction, the less they're forced to deal with the human consequences of their failure to act.

That's why we have to remember their humanity. We have to ask about their names and their families. We have to understand who they were and what they cared about.

The other thing that happens with big numbers is that they tend to hide the tremendous differences in the burden of disease forced upon different communities.

Black and brown Americans continue to suffer the consequences of COVID-19 far worse.

Lost lives, lost livelihoods, lost family, lost friends.

Black and Latinx Americans, for example, face two to two and a half times the likelihood of both contracting COVID-19 and dying of the disease.

And the economic consequences have been born hardest by low income people who are both most likely to have to work through the pandemic and most likely to lose a job because of it.

In fact, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that 54% of newly unemployed Americans were in the bottom 20% of earners.

They were almost 10 times as likely to lose their jobs as those in the top 20% of earners.

But the consequences of losing a job aren't just about wages. They're also about healthcare.

As of July, 5.4 million Americans lost their healthcare coverage to the pandemic. And that could get a lot worse.

...