Pandemic: lies, damned lies, and...

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.

--Mark Twain, who mistakenly attributed this quote to Benjamin Disraeli

Lately I've been struggling with the way American deaths from the pandemic are being reported in the USA -- specifically, the not very subtle way certain groups are trying to spin them. Inevitably, people who want to downplay the damage being done by the spread of COVID-19 (and the numbers of people who have died from it) express the total number of dead as a very small percentage of those who become ill -- or worse, as an even smaller percentage of the overall population of America or the world. The suggestion is that losing such a small percentage of people isn't that big a deal, and we shouldn't worry about it or blame this administration for it.

Let's set aside for the moment that getting COVID-19 is not a binary experience -- it's not just two options, death or complete recovery. Let's ignore the concerns of long-haul COVID-19 patients who are still suffering from lingering symptoms nearly a year after contracting the disease. Let's pretend we can make "herd immunity" work even though there are documented instances where people have gotten sick, recovered, then contracted another mutation of the virus and died.

Because I just want to talk about percentages. Let's talk about how percentages can be used.

Here's an interesting example: the Holocaust.

If you're about my age, you probably know quite a bit about the Holocaust. You studied it in school, read about it in books, saw documentaries or historical fiction films that discussed it in detail. You know the names of extermination camps like Dachau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Auschwitz; you know what Zyklon-B was used for; you know about the experiments and the torture; you know what murderous form Hitler's "Final Solution" took. For those of you who don't know, the most accurate estimate to date is that the Nazis systematically killed about six million Jews in the Holocaust, in an attempt to wipe them out completely as a people.

And six million seems like a lot, until you think about it as a percentage of the world's population. In 1938, before the war started in Europe, there was an estimated world population of around 2.2 billion people.

6 million out of 2.2 billion? That's just 0.27% of the population. Not even a full percentage point.

What if we add in all the other people the Nazis systematically wiped out? The Communists, the pacifists, the LGBTQ people, the Roma, the people who were caught harboring Jews in their homes, anyone the Nazis considered misfits, racially impure or socially undesirable? That's another 5 million, which adds up to 11 million dead. But even adding in the others, that still brings the Nazi death camp toll to a mere 0.5% of the world's population.

That doesn't sound so bad now, does it?

Here's the thing: there are actually people who try to justify the murderous Nazi purges of World War II by expressing those deaths as a percentage. Just like certain people are trying to justify the rising death count in the USA by expressing those deaths as percentages. The trouble is, expressing unnecessary human deaths as percentages of a total is a pretty bald attempt to pretend that real human lives are merely statistical data, that "excess deaths" are not traumatic, horrifying experiences for family and friends of those thousands of people who died alone, struggling to breathe. It's led to the callous argument that since a large percentage of people who have died to date were over 70 and had medical comorbidities -- heart disease, diabetes, obesity, asthma, cancer -- their deaths don't really count, since they were just sick old boomers who would've died anyway. (It seems wise to insert a gentle reminder here that the argument "they would've died anyway" is a very slippery slope indeed. Because if you choose to normalize death this way, it's possible to rationalize a number of truly horrific acts, since all human beings eventually die.)

When you use percentages to downplay deaths, you are suggesting that unless the percentages get to a certain arbitrary size, those deaths of real people don't really count. That it's not really a tragedy, just a statistic. That we should all shrug, pick up our tools and get back to work.

Because work sets you free, I guess.

I'm not saying you folks are Nazis or anything, but if you don't want to be tarred by association, you might not want to stand that close to Dr. Mengele.

 

Numbers convey
the tragic scale
even as they
render the weight
manageable.

Fifty thousand is
a horrid number
but it is still
just
a number.

If the dead were
never counted
but only
and always named
it would break us. 

--ZML, "Plague Poems"