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If you think 100,000 deaths will act as a wake up call, consider that the average American has only a 4% chance of being close to one of the deceased. There is, however, a 99% chance they are close to someone who lost a job. Heck, there’s a 12% chance they lost their job.*
There is nothing inevitable about us coming to a shared understanding of this tragedy. Unlike crowd size, one need not ignore their own eyes to believe the “cure was worse than the disease.”
Rather, most folks need only look to their own lives and stop there. Coming to terms with the raw number of deaths asks this cohort to move beyond lived experience.
In normal times, this would be a lot to ask given the real pain they are facing.
In normal times, our leaders would recognize this and the difficulty of shared sacrifice. They would work to bolster our resolve, to unite us.
In normal times, whether or not one should take simple steps to prevent disease transmission while in the throws of a global pandemic would not be up for debate.
In normal times, the president, even if caught off guard in the beginning, would have used the time bought by shelter in place orders to devise a plan, not to identify scapegoats.
Of course, these are not normal times. A nation that on paper looked to be among the most prepared and best positioned to deal with a pandemic finds itself with about a third of the world’s deaths despite having only about 4% of the global population.
It is a catastrophic failure almost beyond imagining, and yet, there is nothing inevitable about the arrival of a shared narrative.
When I participated in the March for Science, I worried that politicians would ignore climate change because it was too distant. I never imagined that 100,000 dead Americans would be sufficiently distant for them to attempt the same trick
*Please keep in mind, these are back-of-the-envelope calculations, meant only to give us a sense of perspective. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back-of-the-envelope_calculation
That being said, here’s my work. Given the US has a population of 329,000,000, the odds that any single American is found among the dead is 100,000/329,000,000 = 0.0003, or 0.03%. So there’s a 100%-0.03% = 99.97% chance one finds themselves among the living.
To figure out how likely one is to know one of the deceased, we need to know the number of ppls they know. A while back I used the “we all know 600 ppl factoid you get from Google.” In this thread, however, I’ve used Dunbar’s number as it seems more apt. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
Dunbar’s Number (our standin for the number of folks one knows well) is 150, and the odds that 150 folks escape without a single death are 0.9997^150 = 0.956, or 95.6%. So the chance that one will know at least one of the dead is 100%-95.6% = 4.4%.
Repeat this reasoning for 40 million lost jobs, and you get 1-(1-(40,000,000/329,000,000))^150 = 0.999, or 99.9%.
And (40,000,000/329,000,000) = 0.121, or 12.1%.
Of course, the estimates change when you’re looking at someone other than the “average American.” The average New Yorker, e.g., has a far greater chance of knowing one of the deceased well, and yes, there’s the question of what it means to know someone well.
Just remember these are estimates meant to get at relationships. Maybe I should be using something between the Dunbar Number and that 600 ppl factoid. And obviously the risk of death between people is not independent.
The point, however, is that a lot of folks are closer to the loss of livelihoods than lives. I fear that absent a unifying voice, continued sacrifice will likely become harder, not easier.
It’s almost like the successful navigation of this crisis demands a national leader equal to the challenge.
