Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together. Like many reporters on The New York Times’s National desk, I have been covering the coronavirus pandemic for nearly a year. I had interviewed psychologists about how “psychic numbing” made it difficult for the human brain to process coronavirus deaths on the scale at which they were occurring. But finding a way through the natural defense mechanism that dulls our collective response to the pandemic was the point of this assignment. As we neared a wrenching record — 100,000 virus deaths in just five weeks, surpassing 400,000 since the beginning of the pandemic — our editors wanted us to go deep rather than wide.

Source: New York Times January 27, 2021 10:01 UTC