There’s some debate over the ability of the human mind to really comprehend numbers, especially as they get bigger.
Five is simple. One can easily picture five children playing, five flowers gathered into a bouquet.
Five hundred is manageable: 500 pennies stacked, 500 chairs in an auditorium.
Five thousand gets harder; 50,000 is harder still.
Add another zero — 500,000 — and the number is nearly incomprehensible, especially when that number is attached to death.
America reached a grim milestone Monday when the number of recorded deaths from COVID-19 hit 500,000.
A half-million residents of the United States have succumbed to this deadly pandemic in about a year.
As humans, we like to quantify, to count, to measure. And this loss of American lives will, indeed, be tallied in a multitude of ways: unearned and unspent dollars as calculated by economists; shifts in mortality and insurance rates as gauged and projected by epidemiologists and actuaries.
But there’s no way to fully assess the impact of COVID-19, not numerically. Not really.
We can’t count the number of tears shed. We can’t measure the fear. We can’t estimate the resolve to combat and conquer the scourge.
And so we tabulate. We compare. The loss to COVID-19 exceeds the battlefield deaths of World War I, World War II and Vietnam, combined. The loss to COVID-19 equals the population of Atlanta.
Worldwide, some 2.5 million fatalities have been recorded from COVID. The incident rate for illness is far higher: 28.2 million in the U.S.; 112 million in the world.
Some people believe all these numbers are so high they amount to an abstraction.
But the numbers reflect people: our family, a neighbor, a friend of a friend.
— Tribune News Service
