The numbers game

Our lives have increasingly become ruled by numbers, especially in this second year of the Covid pandemic

As we look back at how, just a year ago, we first started to hear about this obscure illness that was wreaking havoc in a remote corner of China, we remember the figures that started the global panic and involuntarily smile for the numbers that so shocked us then were so puny in contrast with the numbers we have grown used to since then.

Even in our small world, the numbers grow and fluctuate with a perverse logic of their own which does not seem to obey any law except the internal logic of the disease itself.

We, and all the world along with us, have now grown used to the iron rule of the numbers as the only way to understand what is happening and also the only real way we have so far of one day overcoming the pandemic.

The numbers tell us above all which of our policies work and which do not. When our policies worked, the number of infections decreased but when the authorities gave in to pressures, and especially when people were allowed to mingle and migrate, the virus had a field day.

It is that simple and yet governments all over the world persisted in getting it wrong.

From Donald Trump to Bolsonaro to Boris Johnson to our own Robert Abela it was the people who suffered and especially the aged who suffered an atrocious death.

The numbers, the numbers at the till, that is, have consequently closed down operations all over the world, countries have been forced to isolate themselves, flights have been cancelled and tourism postponed till better times.

The day when the world recovers has been postponed again and again – first it was to be by last Christmas, then by the coming Easter, now tentatively after summer. The fact is nobody has any idea and all these tentative dates are based on hopes and thus ephemeral.

Now we have the vaccine, or rather three or four of them but apart from huge logistical problems about production and distribution and ensuring that the poor countries are not trodden down by the rich in the scramble for them, not enough data has been gathered to assure of their effectiveness and to ensure there are no hidden side effects.

Every day the latest numbers are revealed and many of us have come to await them and to compare them with those of other days. Other countries, such as the UK, also compare the most recent numbers with those of the preceding week.

States and governments also compare their own figures with those of comparable countries and the results then feed in to decisions that are taken about opening or closing borders, allowing flights, etc.

At the same time, these numbers also tell us which countries have managed to contain the spread and which countries have seen their health services get overwhelmed. In each case, the numbers tell us which polices have worked and which have failed.

There is now enough data to prove that those countries which went for harsh measures did contain the pandemic while those who chose a softer approach took longer to flatten the curve and to bring the number of infections down.

This is no rocket science, it is a matter of studying the numbers carefully and of letting the health experts take the appropriate decisions with no iffs and no bits.

Another numbers issue regards the state of health system and preparing for an influx of infected persons.

A scary example comes from Lebanon, still reeling from the huge explosion at the harbour where the weak government gave in to pressures by nightclub owners and relaxed controls over Christmas, as a result of which the hospitals have been overwhelmed and cannot cope.

So too in Moldova, as a result of a poor economy.

There was a time here in Malta when we were told of a completely new hospital to be set up, of new wards to be opened up here and there, but nothing seems to have been done.

Then of course there is the question of staffing and nurses and other staff were imported from abroad, with reportedly difficulties in language exchanges with patients and other staff.

Counting the dead is one way of understanding the situation (meanwhile, writing on Friday afternoon, the numbers said three people have died, all very elderly, whereas I know of a person in his fifties who has died of Covid after a terrible week in ITU) but not the whole story.

Not factored in the numbers is what happens to those who have been declared cured. In two cases I know of, the aftereffects of Covid, though obviously far better than agony and death, are still severely disabling.

And all this without taking into account the possibility of class action by relatives of the dead against health structures they deem responsible where a patient entered hospital without the virus and got infected there.