Names, Not Numbers
We’ve spent a lot of time lately reciting numbers to you…the number of people who have tested positive for COVID-19, the number who have died…we break it down by state, by county…we know what percentage of people affected come from a certain care center, and some even re-do the math to make sure the percentages the state is reporting are accurate.
We’ve even put a Fox News graphic on our coronavirus web page, keeping a running total in this country, and globally. It’s literally a scoreboard.
But while reporting numbers gives us some context and scope of the pandemic, it’s easy to forget that each of those numbers is associated with a human being…and the exponentially larger number of other human beings affected by that one person.
Most of those who have been affected or who have died are not known to us by name. We know of famous people–singers, actors, politicians. We mourn their loss, but their lives are no more or less important than any of the others. Sort of like when a famous person dies in an accident…others are killed, too, but the attention is paid to the well-known person.
The sterility of reporting on this health crisis, identifying those individuals simply by a geographic county and an age range that arbitrarily spans two decades, makes it very easy to forget that we’re talking about humans whose lives have intersected with and affected a myriad of others. Understandable, especially in our current scoreboard society. But it’s worth remembering that each number represents a name, a face, and a life that had impact.
