I tried various sizes. The containers were just too small to visibly fit 200,000 dead people (there are actually about 199,400 represented in panels 5-7... painstakingly plotted so that they were tidy and evenly spaced). When it appeared in print today, the carnage was blurred to gray.
Below is a closeup from the original source image... each dot is a death. Not all of 'em at the hands of ineptitude and negligence... but enough are dead due to deceit and scientific ignorance that it's perfectly appropriate to forever paint Trump's hands blood red.
Trudeau delivers the pencils many weeks in advance. At the time that I inked this strip, 200,000 dead Americans seemed implausible. Still does.
When I first visited Maya Lin's Vietnam Memorial as a kid, there were simply too many names to process. But I saw people weeping, with one hand on their faces, the other pressed against a particular name engraved in black granite. It stuck. That war was a horrible mistake. The response to this pandemic may be worse. We're going to need a bigger memorial... just don't ask me what it should look like. Clearly, I'm not capable of visualizing or processing so much needless death.