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Big numbers are too much for the human mind to comprehend. An example: the best-selling book of all time is the bible (5B copies); the best-selling non-fiction book is A Tale of Two Cities (~200M). Both huge numbers. If you drove a Ferrari past every copy of AToTC...(1/n)
You'd need to drive for 24 hours to pass them all. To drive past every copy of the bible, you'd need to drive for an entire month. The human mind can't intuitively grasp the size of either 200M or 5B--or the difference between them. (2/n)
This matters as the death toll, and number of cases, of COVID-19 continue to climb. 144,000 people have lost their lives in the U.S. as of July 22. What does that number mean? We're numb to its magnitude. (3/n)
So, some context: that's 48 times greater than the death toll of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, or one 9/11 every day from January 1 to February 17. (4/n)
The average person knows around 600 people (lots of variance, obviously). The COVID-19 death toll is 240x greater than that number. COVID-19 has effectively wiped out the face-to-face social networks of 240 people. (5/n)
The death toll is large enough to have wiped out every citizen of Savannah, GA; Topeka, KS; Columbia, SC; Pasadena CA; and hundreds of other midsize U.S. cities. (6/n)
Or to have wiped out every single enrolled student at the Ohio State University PLUS every student enrolled at Texas A&M--two of the largest universities in the U.S. (7/n)
And 144k people could fill the largest stadium in the U.S.--Michigan Stadium--and then fill it a second time to 35% capacity. They could fill the largest arena in the U.S., the Greensboro Coliseum, more than six times. (8/n)
There are many other, powerful ways to show just how massive the number 144,000 is. (Noisy) forecasts suggest the number will approach or exceed a quarter million in the U.S. (9/n)
We can't let the magnitude of those numbers dull us, or allow the policymakers botching our response to the virus off the hook as those numbers escalate. (10/10)
(ugh, that should be FICTION)
