Local Opinion: COVID-19 deaths aren't statistics, they're people

Last week, while watching PBS News Hour, I saw an interview with a New York City EMT. He recounted the trials and tribulations confronting him and his colleagues when dealing with people with the COVID-19 virus.

Toward the end of his interview he paused and shook his head a little and then stated that we are ignoring the very lives of those who have died from the virus.

He said they have become just another statistic; another number posted to show the growth of these deaths. After a second pause he said, with obvious emotion in his voice, that these are not statistics, that those who have died are real people, human beings, people with families and relatives and friends.

These are people with names and occupations, he said softly, and should be recognized for that fact.

Unfortunately, we humans have a propensity to relegate all things to statistics. It is a bad habit we have developed in order to analyze and measure trends and patterns and convert these numbers into studies that result in decision-making efforts. This has become even more prevalent now with this coronavirus.

Everybody is trying to get a handle on this terrible disease and subsequently we measure success or failure by the numbers. We have simply dehumanized the whole process, not recognizing the individual person and replacing that person — the human, the father or mother or child or grandparent — with a number, a cold irrelevant and highly impersonal number.

In the midst of all the recognition of those now on the front line of saving lives, there has to be pause given to remembering the victims of this pandemic. The families and friends of these victims, of course, are remembering, painfully remembering. This wasn’t supposed to have happened. How could it have happened? They were doing fine and now suddenly they are dead. Why? And perhaps there will never be an answer to that question.

However, within this yearning for an answer there is yet another question we must all ask ourselves: Is this relegation of a human tragedy to only a statistic a clear indication that we have become immune — become hardened and numbed to the passing of another human being, especially a complete stranger?

Have we become impervious to the fact that a human life has been lost and has become just another number grouped into a bar color on a chart somewhere?

Wouldn’t it be a tragedy if, because of these rapid numbers of deaths that are accumulating, we are now taking these deaths for granted? And if that is the case then there is even a larger tragedy brewing.

Complacency and disinterest can, and often does, lead to carelessness, which can then dangerously transform into dropping our guard because we haven’t absorbed the human impact of this virus.

Taking these virus-caused deaths for granted shifts our focus away from the full consequences of careless behavior and a disregard for safety. It is then that we risk becoming one of those statistics ourselves.

But worse yet, we can become an agent for the virus and spread the doom to many others simply because we have not absorbed the full empathy for this being a human misfortune and not simply a statistic.

The 16th Century English poet John Donne wrote in his famous sermon, “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

Indeed, the bell tolls not for statistics.