Behind the statistics

The quote about a sin­gle death being a tragedy, while a mil­lion deaths is a sta­tis­tic is at­trib­uted to the dic­ta­tor Joseph Stalin, and given that the for­mer So­viet leader was re­spon­si­ble for tak­ing the lives of mil­lions of peo­ple, it sounds like the sort of thing he might have said. Whether Stalin ac­tu­ally ut­tered the words or not, they have the ring of truth about them, and we see this dy­namic at work every day in the media.

When a plane crashes and every­one on board is killed, the press will solemnly re­port that two Cata­lans/Ital­ians/Britons/Ger­mans (de­pend­ing on the coun­try in ques­tion) died in the ac­ci­dent, while the fact that dozens of face­less and un­named human be­ings of other na­tion­al­i­ties also per­ished is just part of the con­text.

In the cur­rent health cri­sis, we have been hear­ing how hun­dreds of peo­ple passed away due to coro­n­avirus the day be­fore, only to be su­per­seded by an­other few hun­dred just 24 hours later, and so on. At the time of writ­ing, al­most 5,000 peo­ple have of­fi­cially died in Cat­alo­nia be­cause of Covid-19, which are among the more than 23,000 fa­tal­i­ties in Spain as a whole, from among the 207,000 who have so far died world­wide.

To focus on a sin­gle death given such large num­bers of peo­ple, all of whom had their own iden­ti­ties and lives, and who left be­hind loved ones who mourn their pass­ing, doesn’t seem right some­how. And yet, as jour­nal­ists well know, a sin­gle and spe­cific ex­am­ple can often un­lock a broader un­der­stand­ing of the big­ger pic­ture in a way that a tor­rent of over­whelm­ing sta­tis­tics can never do.

I wit­nessed an ex­am­ple of this in my own life re­cently when a close fam­ily mem­ber in Eng­land died. Talk­ing to my rel­a­tives who were on the spot, I learned how, due to the lock­down, no one was al­lowed to be in the same room with her ex­cept for a carer, and that the clos­est they could get in her final hours was to look through the win­dow from the gar­den of the home where she resided, and wave.

I hadn’t even thought about that.

And then by co­in­ci­dence, just a cou­ple of days later, I read a let­ter sent to a news­pa­per by an 81-year old man mak­ing the point that, “out of hu­man­ity”, the re­stric­tions should be waived so that peo­ple can be close to their loved ones when they are dying. “I don’t like to think that, when my time comes, I would not be able to say good­bye to my wife and my chil­dren,” con­cluded the el­derly gen­tle­man.

How many thou­sands of those peo­ple who have fallen vic­tim to Covid-19 have died alone? Some hos­pi­tals and homes are now al­low­ing peo­ple into the rooms where their loved ones are dying, al­beit dressed in pro­tec­tive cloth­ing. These are the things that the sta­tis­tics can­not tell us in quite the same way as can a sin­gle, tragic, death.