What’s a life worth? Maybe Covid shows us the answer
On Boxing Day my brother set up a video chat from his English living room. At his end: a family of four, a cat and a spectacular Christmas fir tree. Onmy side: a sunny porch with two aunts, an uncle, a cousin, a brother-in-law, a sister and, above us, a tu¯ı¯ ina cabbage tree.
My niece Helen wore a green tinsel witch’s hat.
In England, it was late on Christmas Day. Dawn meant ‘‘tier 4’’ and a confusing edict to stay at home unless going to a funeral, taking children to school, or picketing aworkplace.
‘‘You are sooo lucky!’’ they chorused.
‘‘Hey – guesswhat?’’, I said. ‘‘Some guy wrote a newspaper column today saying we have overreacted to the pandemic.’’
Cue astonishment. ‘‘But New Zealand has done so well!’’
To be fair, John Roughan’s NZ Herald column, titled ‘‘Did we overestimate the pandemic threat?’’, never does explain who ‘‘we’’ is. Does he mean New Zealand – or the entire world?
His final line: ‘‘Like terrorism, war and aWall St crash, a pandemic has long been a recognised threat, but we may have overestimated it.’’
Roughan blames ‘‘the news’’, which has ‘‘feasted on numbers. Big, raw numbers published without context or perspective’’, a metaphor itself spectacularly lacking in context or perspective – ‘‘the news’’ as a lobotomised piranha gnawing on a bloody T-bone.
And what to make of paragraphs like this? ‘‘When you contact relatives abroad, or talk to people who have come from those countries, it’s rare to hear the virus has touched them or anyone they know.’’
Normally I do not know people involved in world news stories. But I do know people who have met this virus, although they describe it as less of a ‘‘touch’’ and more of a chokehold.
I have broken bread with two victims, here in Auckland. The brother of a friend spent days in the ICU. A London pal rattled off nine people he knows who have had Covid-19, or have it now. One of his friends had ‘‘long Covid’’ badly enough to prevent him from working.
He told me: ‘‘The problem with most journalists is that they don’t know many working-class or people of colour.’’
The statistics of Covid – or ‘‘big, dumb, mind-numbing numbers’’ as Roughan calls them – seem to irritate rather than horrify him. ‘‘To get a sense of proportion,’’ he informs you, me, and the epidemiologists at the WHO, ‘‘you [have] to do your own maths.
According to the Worldometer website, 78 million people have caught Covid-19 since it appeared.’’ (In fact, world cases are increasing so quickly that we could use Roughan’s 78m figure to date his column. The same stat on the same website onWednesday was 82,011,582.)
‘‘That figure [78m] sounds huge,’’ Roughan continues, ‘‘but it’s 1 per cent of the 7.8 billion people in the world. Of that 1 per cent, 55m have recovered and 1.7m have died, just under 3 per cent of the total.’’
He could, instead, havewritten: ‘‘One per cent of 7.8b might sound tiny. But it is actually 78m sons and daughters, mothers and fathers.’’
And what lies hidden inside those bland ‘‘recovered’’ stats? The heroic work of cleaners, ambulance drivers, physicians, nurses, therapists, midwives, pharmacists, medicalmanagers, laboratory scientists and quarantine facility workers, who struggled to save those liveswhile risking their own.
The point of preventive measures is to avoid a catastrophic demand on these people – our healthcare service – and its ICU capacity. When the health system cannot cope, many people die, for a tragic variety of reasons.
Roughan also might have noticed that some of these ‘‘recovered’’ patients haven’t recovered after all, because they still suffer from long Covid.
The Atlantic writer Ed Yong explains, in a piece about conceptual errors which help spread the virus, ‘‘public health departments are chronically underfunded because the suffering they prevent is invisible. Many people spared the ravages of Covid19 argue that the disease wasn’t a big deal, or associate theirwoes with preventive measures. But the problem is still the disease those measures prevented.’’
The US has a population of 330m. When I last checked the Worldometer website, it reported 343,851 people had died in the US after catching Covid-19. This figure is not 1 per cent of recorded US virus cases, but 1 per cent of the entire population of the US. Dead of Covid-19. That we know.
This week, the usually cautious English mathematician and epidemiologist Adam Kucharski tweeted that ‘‘a Sars-CoV-2 variant that is 50 per cent more transmissablewould in general be amuch bigger problem than a variant that is 50 per cent more deadly. An increase in something that grows exponentially can have far more effect than the same proportional increase in something that just scales an outcome.’’
Kucharskiwasn’t saying the worrying new UK variant is known to be precisely this transmissable – but he was sounding an alarm.
Jamie Morton, the NZ Herald’s superb science reporter, recently interviewed Victoria University’s Courtney Addison, who has been studying New Zealand’s response to Covid-19.
‘‘We’ve been widely praised for having an evidence-based response to the pandemic, but our response wasn’t just about facts and numbers,’’ she said. ‘‘It reflects profound ideas about right and wrong, about lifeworth, and about what we owe each other as citizens.’’