NEW BRUNSWICK, NJ—As the 10-month-old pandemic continued its rampant spread and the nation’s death toll passed 350,000, top medical scientists attempted Tuesday to convince the American public to take Covid-19 more seriously by issuing a statement in which they patiently clarified the concept of death. “We just want to be perfectly clear about this: When someone dies from coronavirus, that means they’re gone forever, and they never come back,” read the Rutgers University report, which explained that sometimes people who were sick got sick so badly that every part of their whole body ceased to function—including their heart and brain—and that this was a permanent state from which no one could ever recover. “Now, we could understand if you were shrugging off the consequences of Covid because you thought hundreds of thousands of Americans were just sleeping and would wake up eventually. But that simply isn’t the case here. Let’s try this: Have you ever had a pet, maybe a dog or a cat that you loved, and one day it stopped breathing and became very, very still? Maybe you had a little burial out in the yard? So this is the same thing, only it’s happened to almost 2 million people around the world, some of whom lived in your very own community. Notice we say ‘lived,’ in the past tense. That’s because these people are no longer alive. That’s what can happen, and if it does happen to someone you love, you’ll never see them again, and they’ll never see you again, and that will probably be very sad. Hopefully this clears things up a little.” The report coincides with an attempt by top economists to convince Congress to take Covid’s financial effects on the American people more seriously by explaining the concept of people.