BY MARTIN KICH

One of my most widely read posts to this blog has addressed the difficulty not only in visualizing a million, a billion, and a trillion dollars but also in conceptualizing the great differences between those numbers, which do after all sound a lot alike.

So, today, as we grapple with the reality that, in just the past two months, more than 100,000 Americans have died from COVID-19, I wondered how to visualize and to grasp that toll.

The New York Times filled four full pages with the names of just 1,000 of the deceased, along with short phrases that served to personalize the loss of each person.

To demonstrate that that considerable undertaking honored the memory of just one percent of the victims of this pandemic, the newspaper provided an online graphic that distributed the text from those four print pages, by date, across 100,000 human silhouettes.

I have been trying to think of a way to drive home the scale of the loss in a way that might resonate with faculty and students, and I got an idea from a guest on one of the cable news shows tonight. I don’t know who made this point because I had my back to the television and was focused on my PC screen, and by the time the point sank in, the segment was over and a commercial had come on. But the guest commentator pointed out that if the hour-long news program were devoted to simply reading the names of the deceased and a phrase individualizing each of them, it would take almost 28 weeks or just short of seven months for the task to be completed. And that calculation assumed that the hour-long program would be aired completely commercial-free.

So, I decided to do a similar calculation with class time.

Assuming that one were teaching two one-hour-and-forty-minute classes per week for fourteen weeks, and that it would take five seconds to read each name and describing phrase, it would take 83.33 class periods—or more than three and a half semesters—to complete the task. . . .

To be honest, I thought that such a calculation would have a much more profound impact on me than it has had.

Despite the continuing interest in that earlier post, some numbers are just simply beyond comprehension. When the numbers relate to the expenditure of huge sums of money, it is generally a matter that ought to be taken very seriously, even if the amounts involved are beyond visualizing or even conceptualizing.

But when the numbers memorialize individual lives that have been lost so abruptly, perhaps the only way that we can truly do them justice is to confront our inability to grasp what the numbers signify and to let the incomprehensible scope of our loss sink in.