Those who are fascinated by numbers often have a morbid streak.
It’s not only insurance analysts, financial planners and medical researchers who study death rates. Many of us commoners do, too.
I’ll admit that sometimes, while attending the sort of mass-audience events that are now banned, I would mentally do the calculations. If there are 6,500 baseball fans sitting in Frontier Field, I would think, odds are that 56 of them will die this year.
Which 56? Unknowable. Unthinkable.
These were bleak, maybe even perverse, ideas that would be dispelled by the first batter up.
It’s not so easy to put these thoughts out of mind any more. I’m running the figures, just as everyeone else is.
Government scientists say the coronavirus could kill as many as 240,000 Americans. By my reckoning, that’s about one in 1,400 people.
What are the odds that the virus will take me or someone in my life? One in 1,400? Or higher, because I’m older, because I continue to work in a grocery store, because I live in New York State?
Do I even have 1,400 people in my life? Certainly, if I include not only close friends and family, but school classmates, people from my hometown, former co-workers, old friends I haven’t seen in years.
Social media probably means that no matter how distant the relationship, I’ll hear about any loss to Covid-19.
My first reaction, of course, will be grief. After that, I just don’t know. Relief or panic? Will I irrationally view such a death as inoculation against further loss? Or will I feel a tightness in my chest, a rising awareness of death closing in?
The very estimate from our government grieves me. My second response is terror, anger, and a refusal to accept the numbers.
Beautifully written; very poignant.
I was reading Station Eleven and was thinking the same thoughts last eve before heading upstairs.
I also read Station Eleven this year. Most recently, I finally read Camus’s “The Plague.” I guess we can’t help ourselves.