The tragedy at this year’s Hajj is just the beginning

In April 2020, when New York City was the “Covid capital of the world,” 815 New Yorkers died from the disease on the city’s deadliest day. A potter’s field burial site on Hart Island was receiving 24 bodies each day, as many as the city typically used to bury there in a week.

Last month in Karachi, Pakistan, temperatures approached 120 degrees Fahrenheit and hospitals reportedly treated thousands for heatstroke. A nonprofit operating four mortuaries registered 128 deaths in a single day, mostly of people on the margins of society. The next day it registered 135. There are no reliable citywide death totals, but over a five-day period the Edhi Foundation, which handles about 40 daily deaths in more normal times, says it took in 568 bodies.

Last weekend, the heat came home for Americans. In June, more than one-third of the country’s population was under extreme heat advisories, but immediately after Independence Day things intensified. In Palm Springs, Calif., temperatures reached a record 124 degrees, Las Vegas broke its own previous record by three degrees and in Death Valley, Calif., temperatures reached 129, within one degree of the all-time, anywhere-in-the-world modern record. Across the West, temperatures routinely registered 15 to 30 degrees above average, and in California, at the beginning of a “historic” heat wave made five times more likely by climate change, scientists predicted a statewide death toll of about 100 each day.

In his vivid book “The Heat Will Kill You First,” Jeff Goodell describes one worst-case scenario as “the Hurricane Katrina of extreme heat,” echoing the words of the researcher Mikhail Chester: a dayslong blackout in metropolitan Phoenix coinciding with a now-routine heat wave and half of the city requiring medical attention. This is, admittedly, an unlikely set of circumstances — the whole city going fully dark for a few days, then taking a few more to get power up and running again. But suspected heat deaths in Phoenix have nearly doubled since last year, when temperatures reached 110 or more for 31 straight days and the city’s burn centers were filling up with people who had fainted or fallen and been scalded by asphalt. Fourteen people died from those contact burns; this year, so far, four have.