U.S. virus deaths at 100,000: What does a number mean?


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This is the week when America's official coronavirus death toll reaches six digits. One hundred thousand lives wiped out by a disease unknown to science a half a year ago.

And as the unwanted figure arrives - nearly a third of the global death toll in the first five months of a very trying year - what can looking at that one and those five zeroes tell us? What does any number deployed in momentous times to convey scope and seriousness and thought really mean?




"Numbers," she wrote, "represented a means of imposing sense and order on what Walt Whitman tellingly depicted as the 'countless graves' of the 'infinite dead.'"

Today's Americans have precedents for visualizing and understanding 100,000 people - dead and alive. They have numerous comparisons at hand.


The total amount of U.S. Civil War deaths - combat and otherwise - was 655,000. For World War I it was more than 116,000, for World War II more than 405,000 and for the Korean and Vietnam wars more than 36,000 and more than 58,000 respectively. Those don't include non-U.S. deaths.


At some point with numbers, though, things start feeling more abstract and less comprehensible. This has informed the methodology of remembering the Holocaust by humanizing it: The deaths of 6 million Jews, after all, among many others, is a figure so enormous that it resists comprehension.



The New York Times tried to address that problem Sunday, dedicating its entire front page to naming the virus dead - an exercise that, even in a tiny typeface, only captured 1% of those now gone. "A count," the newspaper said, "reveals only so much."



Our brains, he says, are wired to be empathetic to suffering - to a point.

"With too much suffering over time, it's overwhelming, and we begin to become callous. And our empathy essentially runs out," Van Tongeren says. "We're so accustomed to death right now, at 100,000, that our empathy has become lower."

Finally, there are numbers living within the round 100,000 number that cry out for their own interpretations. The disproportionate number of dead Americans of color, for example. Or the systematic way the disease is ravaging places where older Americans live, taking them in numbers that - if they were dying in mass shootings - might provoke a very different kind of reaction.


But whether 100,000 has already happened or is yet to come, the meaning of this numerical milestone - human-imposed though it may be - raises some fundamental questions.


In the 14th century, the Black Death ravaged humanity, taking many millions. No one knows how many died. Today, when the dead are counted, some coherence is reached. The thinking is this: If the virus can't be stopped, at least it can be quantified by human effort - far more palatable than a society where we couldn't even establish who was no longer among us.



Replacing that situation with accurate numbers, as society grew more sophisticated, did not solve everything. But it was something. Just as 100,000 means something this week in American life. Maybe not everything - not a vaccine, not a treatment - and maybe not clarity, exactly. Not yet. But something.

