W
hen one man dies, it’s a tragedy; when 100,000 men die, it’s a statistic.”
This quote is variously attributed to Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler or Napoleon Bonaparte. It bears more than a little relevance these days. We live in a time when we are besieged by statistics. Number of infections, number of hospitalizations, number of ventilators or masks. Number of unemployed. Number of recovered. Number of deaths. Number of deaths. Unaccustomed as we, and most of the rest of the world, are to grasping the scope and context of a global pandemic, we can extend ourselves and our need for understanding not much further than numbers, as the culprit is essentially invisible, thrives and moves according to its own whim and flourishes remorselessly, as life itself is wont to do. The numbers are the virus’ footprints in the snow, and to a large extent, all we can do is follow its tracks, estimate its path, anticipate its exhaustion, coax it somehow into a no-exit cul de sac and prod it toward its own extinction. In February, my elderly father passed away in Marin County, California. A few weeks after his 98th birthday, he took a fall at home while his wife was at work, and his daytime caregiver, responding to California law, called an ambulance over my father’s fruitless objections. He wasn’t hurt, not too badly anyway except for a slightly bruised arm, but they took him in, checked him over, kept him for a few days and then released him to a rehab center. They wanted to see him gain some strength in his legs, in the hopes he could avert, or at least significantly delay, another fall. While at the rehab center, he caught what was described as a fast-moving respiratory virus, was quickly transferred back to a hospital ICU, and was gone in a day. Acute respiratory distress. It was Feb. 9. He was 98 years old, a relatively healthy 98 at BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE
that; seldom sick, a little wobbly and inconsistently in command of his emotions and his memory, but to my own recollection, never seriously ill. Gave up smoking in 1952, drinking in 1955. A passionate golfer, until he had to give it up in his early 80s due to creeping immobility of his shoulders. He was a World War II veteran, a flight instructor (he taught the baseball great Ted Williams how to fly) and, by the time he left the military in late 1945, he was a captain in the Marines, at age 24. Doddering and feeble he was not. He was indifferent to the term “the Greatest Generation,” shrugged it off as a meaningless media creation, but he was one of its number. He couldn’t operate a home computer. He didn’t know who Mick Jagger was. An imperfect but decent and erudite man, full of humor and insight, a devourer of history, and a Roosevelt Democrat to his core. When
IT DOESN’T MATTER how
started digging into the numbers, prompted by a need to understand and potentially thwart the virus via its pathology and tracked infectiousness. Because so few people were being tested for the virus, but deaths were being recorded anyway as a matter of course, public health statisticians and researchers came to the realization that more people were dying from this thing, or dying from its proximate complications, than were originally recorded. In the aggregate, we know about how many people die every day, from disease or misadventure or lifestyle neglect or influenza or old age. Medicare, Social Security, insurance carriers access these numbers all the time. Hospitals supply themselves based on these numbers. Pharma companies determine much of their product to manufacture. It’s actuarial science. A blanket set of numbers that, more or less, provides a statistical fabric across which our collective mortality is tallied. Grim predictability. Some people spend their entire professional lives studying these things. And not just here, but in other countries ravaged by this spiky little ball, there were far more people dying than actuarial tables, appended by test-verified COVID-19 mortality, could explain. A lot more. The inescapable conclusion was that far more people were getting this thing, and far more were dying from it, than “official” tallies could narrate. Dying alone or dying in fear of (or lacking the means to access) hospitals. Dying because they couldn’t get tested, and thus treated. The mortality figures climbed. At this writing, in the United States, it’s about 83,000. The official number. The real number is higher — everyone who has been tracking this event and knows anything about actuarial science and epidemiology now knows this. Across the world, the statistics bear this undercount out. For the month between March 24 and April 24, the New York Times reported that the U.K.’s death count was more than 14,000 higher than normal plus confirmed COVID-19 mortalities. In France, from mid-March to mid-April, the difference was more than 6,000. In New York City alone, the difference in the period March 11 to
many caskets there are. It only matters who’s counting them. Now, go get that haircut. they killed John Kennedy, he wept on and off for three weeks. By early March, the term “coronavirus” had ingrained itself into the news cycle, into our daily conversation, into our heads. Names and epidemiological terms we were unaccustomed to became commonplace. “Distance” became a verb. “Flattening the curve” sounded like a call to arms from a Richard Simmons video, but it had to do with the ICU. By early April, locked down in front of our televisions and laptop screens, working from home or not working at all, we settled into the routine of watching the rolling toll that the virus exacted on the population, on the economy, on living itself. All of it in numbers. And then something happened. Health officials I
MAY 14, 2020
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