Statistics can't measure human cost

How many cases? What percentage of people fall ill and how many end up in hospital? How many of those die? We have all become experts in the grim statistics that frame news from around the world.

Why is the fatality rate in Italy so high? Why is Germany’s so low? What is herd immunity?

Behind each statistic are yet more about ICU beds, testing regimes and even numbers of smokers, obesity levels and average temperatures.

And so it goes on. How many ventilators does the NHS have and why does the US have so many cases?

The key stat at the moment is how many tests are being done.

The UK is seen to be failing its population as it struggles to reach its initial target of 10,000 a day. Islanders using the trick of dividing everything by 1,000 to get the Bailiwick equivalent might take some comfort in our testing capacity of 75.

Every day, a numerical landmark is passed. The first confirmed case outside Wuhan, the first outside China, the first fatality in Europe, the 2,000th in the UK, the first in the Channel Islands.

All too quickly the numbers have mounted. The John Hopkins University of Medicine has published a fact-filled chart since the early days tracking the relentless advance of Covid-19 across the globe.

It shows that before long another milestone will pass: a million confirmed cases. Tuesday’s daily increase of 75,000 took the total to 885,000.

And all the while the number of deaths climbs inexorably towards 50,000.

Dive down into the numbers and you find numerical anomalies. The town of Snohomish in Washington State, for example, warrants its own fatalities column (33) despite a population of just 9,000.

Of course, this daily fascination for figures masks the human horror behind each death, each battle to draw breath.

Perhaps that is the point. By reducing the virus to a series of cold statistics we do not have to think about how many vulnerable people are dying alone in hospital beds far from their loving families.