As the Pandemic Grows, We Seek Comfort in Uncertain Numbers
Every morning, I check the numbers at the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Research Center. I stare at the millions, the hundreds of thousands, the red dots that blend into a huge red blur. I enlarge the map and click on my county, noting the jump in infectious cases and the increase in deaths. I glance at the bottom of the map, where a line graph continues to go up, up, up, and I switch to the logarithmic graph with a line that curves more gently and is reassuringly flatter.
What does it all mean?
The numbers are hard to fathom, to truly understand in human lives. I try to explain to my younger brother, who has a cognitive disability. “Imagine an NFL football game with the stands filled to capacity,” I say. “That’s how many people in the United States have died of Covid-19.” He looks at me, wide-eyed. He cannot conceive it.
Neither can I, not when I get to the hundreds of thousands and the millions. Yet I keep checking the map, several times a day, drilling down and clicking. I examine infection rates and death rates and number of tests per capita. I search online for graphs that show projections and timelines. So much information, so many numbers — and no answers.
I’m not the only one. My friends are doing the same and reporting on social media. Checking the maps, posting the graphs, analyzing the data, critiquing the statistics. It’s obsessive. It’s futile.
Faith and Numbers
But we seek comfort in numbers. They are something concrete and familiar. They represent certainty and the promise that — if someone just does the calculations correctly — we will find an answer.
We put our faith in math and science these days. We should. It’s the scientists who are toiling to find a vaccine or effective treatment for this plague. And the statisticians, data analysts, and probability forecasters are trying to provide meaningful information so healthcare providers and policy makers can make wise decisions. It’s what we’ve always done in our modern world, at least since the Enlightenment in the seventeenth century. We gather the information, analyze the data, work the formulas, and find the solution. We trust numbers.
That’s not to say we don’t also trust in God or religious scriptures anymore. The faithful must worship in self-isolation these days, but their prayers are frequent and fervent for the victims, caregivers, and researchers. Even the nonreligious are silently (and perhaps secretly) sending their hopes to whatever deity or force may receive them. We do seek answers through religion, and in a broader sense, through philosophy. But answers to prayers are often imprecise, elusive, or inexpressible except through intuition. We believe, we know, but we cannot say.
The Imprecise World
Math and science, in contrast, provide us rational knowledge, as Fritjof Capra reminds us in his book, The Tao of Physics. Scientists work to “discriminate, divide, compare, measure, and categorize.” Calculations provide structured knowledge that we can test, confirm, replicate and communicate to others. They reassure us that we understand and are in control. At least, that’s how it seems on the surface.
When I was in eighth grade, my math teacher would stand at the board and demonstrate how to work out a complicated problem, step by step. Then he’d write the answer, circle it, and declare to the class, “And that comes to about 726!”
Our 13-year-old minds were boggled. How can it be “about” 726? Isn’t math exact? Don’t we get marked wrong on a test if our answer doesn’t precisely match the answer key?
Our teacher would shake his head and show us a number with a repeating decimal or formula we couldn’t comprehend where there was a range of “right” answers. “Numbers are measurements,” he would say, “and measurements are always inexact.”
As Capra reminds us, mathematics are only representations of reality, not reality itself. They describe and demonstrate how the world works, but they are not the world. The world tends to be imprecise, messy, unpredictable, and far too often, random. There are more variables than even the most complex formula can account for, and many of these are the result of erratic, irrational, short-sighted human behavior.
That’s the case for the Covid-19 pandemic. Numbers draw a limited picture for us. The number of cases can only be figured on the results of people who have been tested, and only a small portion of the world’s population has been tested. The number of deaths are also an estimate, since many deaths are not reported because of neglect, lack of information, or a desire to hide negative news from the public.
And the numbers cannot begin to describe the human suffering, the pain, or the anxiety. Perhaps that is the motivation behind our obsession with numbers: they allow us, at least temporarily, to deflect our attention away from the fear of infection and the tragedy of the actual disease. The suffering is too large to understand. It overwhelms us emotionally and psychologically.
Plague and Predictions
So we watch the numbers and study the calculations, hoping that a mathematical model of the pandemic will offer us a semblance of control. If only we can wrangle the numbers into the right formula, maybe the statistics will improve. Maybe the pandemic will ease.
It’s magical thinking, but it’s not new. Albert Camus’ 1947 novel, The Plague, tells the story of an epidemic in Oran, Algeria. He describes how churchgoers proselytized, journalists published predictions “based on far-fetched mathematical calculations,” and self-appointed prophets consulted Nostradamus to foresee the plague’s end. Math, science, faith, metaphysics — all were equally considered.
“The one thing these prophecies had in common,” Camus writes, “was that, ultimately, all were reassuring. Unfortunately, though, the plague was not.”
So several times a day, while people argue on social media and politicians stand at podiums in front of cameras, I open the Coronavirus Research Center map and check the numbers, searching in an uncertain world for firm ground.
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