US Covid-19 Infections and Mortality (2-wk period), May 15, 2020

Numbers often do not register in our minds.

Sure, we remember them, maybe, but they leave no taste, no lasting impression, nothing of significance. They are…just dry numbers.

Someone once said that a poem, with its meter and rhyme, is like numbers singing. Poems do make an impression, they stimulate the mind, and I can understand that insight. Perhaps if numbers moved, if they were aflame…

Even the simplest of animations, a ‘visualization’ of numbers as in the figure,  intrigues the mind. Some note with sinking hearts the large growing numbers, infections and deaths, and may see that deaths grow faster than infections in the same period. Others may latch onto the circular red dots on the map of the US expanding as infections spread in localized clusters in the nation…and deduce, perhaps, that these are likely the urban crowded areas of the country. Some may compute the graph of infections rising and lengthening and grasp that on a logarithmic scale, this is a spread of disease that continues to grow exponentially.

I see a raging inferno, nothing less!

I smell fear, suspended, a heaviness in the atmosphere reminiscent of the beginning of a thunderstorm. I feel…resignation.

These numbers do mean something…1.5 million infected is less than one-half of one percent of the nation’s population, and we’ve lost more than 85,000 souls. Imagine what we’ll lose if 50%, one-half of the population were to be infected.

Let that sink into our consciousness, if you will. And drive us to change our ways, respect everyone’s safety, and contain this conflagration that decimates humanity!

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