The Numbers Game

 

Most people have a funny way of looking at things. It’s really hard for them to see the big picture.

If you want to walk to a friend’s house and it’s two miles away, most people will think that is too far and just drive. If you want to go on vacation (back in the days when people did that) and the city you want to visit is 600 miles away, you would never drive. You fly, or take the train.

People know those numbers. They are real.

But lots of us just think of the moon is being far away. So is Jupiter. So is the nearest star. The actual numbers are too big.

There are good reasons for that. First of all, people like numbers that don’t change. Cleveland is always 217 miles from Charleston, S.C.

But the moon has an elliptical orbit, and gets 221,500 miles away at its closest point and 252,700 miles away at its furthest. When we launched a probe to Jupiter, we thought it, too, was far away.

How far? Well, at its closest, Jupiter is 363 million miles from Earth, at its farthest it is 601 million miles.

It sounds as is Jupiter is, at times, not much further away than the moon -252 million miles compared to 363 million.  But, it’s a lot. You wouldn’t want to drive there.

Let me put that in terms we can all understand. If you were in a car driving at a hundred miles an hour and never stopping to eat or sleep or get gas, it would take you more than 1,100 years to get to Jupiter.

See, we can understand big numbers. All we need is a reference point.

Unfortunately, a lot of people in our country - probably in the entire world - don’t have that handy reference point when it comes to Coronavirus. We just can’t see the big picture.

The media doesn’t help a lot. It takes time to put things in perspective, so news stories and features focus on just one person or one small town or one hospital.

Which, of course, is not the fault of the press. You see charts and graphs all the time, and numbers are almost always included in the stories.

But a lot of their audience will focus down on some idiot who got into a fight because someone else told them to wear a mask, or who should get the credit for shipping some generators or PPE equipment.

Those are things we consumers of news can understand, not the rolling toll of death that just keeps getting bigger and bigger. After all, a lot of those fatalities are in other states. Even the process of the disease confuses us. We look at big numbers of cases, and then don’t see the deaths that follow weeks or months later.

And no one seems to be writing about the long-term impact of Covid-19. Which is easy to understand. We don’t know what that might be.

One thing we do know is that the little numbers we understand quickly get bigger and bigger. In Ohio, Governor Mike DeWine tweeted a graphic his health department drew up to show how the virus spread. One 56-year-old man was infected and went to church.

He infected 53 people. Some of them infected others, bringing the total number of infections to 91. That we can understand.

But, what about those 130,000 deaths. Well, when someone dies in a car crash, there are profiles abut who they were, interviews with the people who knew and loved them. One famous person - a major political figure, a well-known singer or playwright, a remarkable athlete - and the papers and screens are filled with tributes for days.

Going back to that car crash. More than 36,000 people died in vehicle crashes in 2018 - nearly 100 people a day, every day. But, by and large, we don’t dwell on it.

Now we are looking at more than 160,000 Covid-19 deaths in the United States, with the possibility it could nearly double by the end of the year. And we are still debating wearing masks, demanding kids go back to school without any plan on how to do it, and looking at teenagers packing beaches and even holding Covid Parties.

Across the world, devastating storms, earthquakes and other natural disasters kill thousands of people - but most of them are too far away or too large to do more than register with us.

Remember Hurricane Michaelin that hit Florida in 2017? It caused $25 billion in damage. The same year, Tropical Storm Son-Tinhin swept across the West Pacific and killed 170 people, a lot of them in Vietnam.

 In truth, I don’t remember much about them either. Just some large numbers. Still, I do remember one year that my family went to Florida. There was a cold snap when we stayed in the Keys.

The state was lush and green when we drove down, with palm trees waving and orange and grapefruit orchards lining the roads. It was brown on the way back. Big damage. I remember it because it was just one thing.

That’s our trouble with big numbers. Like the possibility of 300,000 deaths this year.