Artwork by Michael DiMilo
We’ve watched statistics spill off television screens and scroll across newsfeeds each and every day—for months. Milestones have been acknowledged, marked, and noted. One hundred thousand Americans dead in May. One hundred and fifty thousand in July. Four hundred and five hundred thousand, then six hundred thousand. And yet we still watch the toll continue to rise. Today it has surpassed seven hundred thousand. What does that number even mean in human terms? Who among us can fathom the loss of seven hundred thousand souls—let alone the collateral damage of this loss to families, friends, or neighbors?
Then consider over four and one-half million dead worldwide. The numbers themselves, barely fathomable to begin with, have become next to meaningless when compared to the impact of even a single death. The loss of a loved one is devastating for families, a ripple effect of pain that resonate for years. The numbers don’t touch that depth of feeling; using them to explain it is like trying to use a toddler’s vocabulary to explain quantum physics. Attempts to ground the volume of despair, to help us wrap our heads around the reality, cannot do justice to shattered lives. We might imagine one loss, but not millions.
The population of Boston is seven hundred thousand people; if that city were wiped off the face of the Earth, if every Bostonian perished, we might understand the body count, but not of the collateral emotional cost.
We have become numb to the pandemic. The refrigerated semi-trailers outside of NYC hospitals, the mass graves, and the exhausted health-care workers are no longer disturbing or shocking images; they became the norm, and then they became passe—old news. We’ve heard the stories of the survivors and seen the overcrowded ICUs and the desolated families. And yet, we still don’t seem to get it. People are still refusing to take the pandemic seriously. They won’t mask up, socially distance, or get vaccinated. Some anti-vaxxers actually harass and bully health-care workers.
Seven hundred thousand is a number, an abstraction to these people; it seems to have little meaning or resonance for them. What will it take for them to take this disease seriously? Will they have to suffer the disease themselves? Watch a loved one die? Or perhaps it’s going to take being forced to have their plastic surgery delayed because of overcrowded hospitals. And then what will it take for them to start thinking of the scope of this tragedy, of the magnitude of our loss?
Maybe the only way to bring home the reality of this number is to use a metaphor near and dear to the American heart: money. What would $700,000 in cash money look like? What would a stack of 700,000 one-dollar-bills look like? According to Quora, it would be approximately one foot square at the base and nearly forty feet high for one million dollars. Seven hundred thousand, or approximately three quarters of that, would be about thirty feet high. Thirty feet is about three stories high. If those bills were corpses, how high would your stack be? A supine person probably is about a foot high. A pile of 700,000 stacked corpses would reach over 132 miles, a little less than the distance from Chicago to Madison.
Even using money, effectively communicating this sort of devastation is nearly impossible. Some people will get it because they’ll go to the trouble of trying to imagine it. Others will let the numbers wash over them, like water off a duck. Many won’t understand until they experience it themselves. Even then, even in ICU, some COVID patients still deny the existence of the disease.
Will Rogers once said, “There are three kinds of men. The ones who learn by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.”
And—apparently—some will keep peeing on the fence until they electrocute themselves.