Making the statistics more real

Dying is never fun. I think I can safely say that, although I suppose there may be people who gather together for some kind of final bacchanalia as they expire.

As Peggy Lee sang, long ago,

“If that’s all there is, my friend, then let’s keep dancing. Let’s break out the booze, and have a ball…”

But such a party would, I imagine, be only a way of suppressing their fear of dying.

Those who have been close to a dying person know what it’s like. Pain, even with constant medication. Helplessness. Loss of independence. Loss of control. Loss of memory. Bewilderment. Confusion. Sometimes calm resignation, sometimes anger and bitterness.

Not a pretty picture.

When someone you care about is dying, that’s all that matters. Everything else – indeed, everyone else – fades into insignificance. Which makes it hard to extend your awareness beyond an individual’s death to statistics about the deaths of many individuals.

As I write this, there have been almost 9,000 COVID-19 deaths in Canada; 194 in B.C.; 2 in this health region.

In the bigger picture, the figures become more numbing: almost 700,000 deaths worldwide. Nationally, the U.S. leads the pack, with 154,000 deaths. To put that into perspective, it’s roughly 20 times the total U.S. deaths fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Brazil, Mexico, and India follow, in that order.

But you’re still not getting the whole picture.

Because those statistics don’t, and can’t, include those who die as a result of the pandemic, but not because of the coronavirus itself.

Seniors, for example, who may never get the virus itself, because of their enforced solitary confinement – for their own good, of course. But they are dying of utter loneliness.

Vivek Murthy, surgeon-general of the U.S. from 2014-2017, cites figures that 22% of Americans admit to feeling lonely, all or most of the time – even before pandemic lockdown. Australia and Britain estimated 25%.

Those figures will certainly be higher now, as a result of the coronavirus.

There’s also no accounting, even here in the affluent world, of the number of suicides attributable to business and farming failures that wipe out life savings and family futures.

And now the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund, UNICEF, declares that 10,000 children are dying every month in the non-affluent world because of the pandemic. That’s not just 10,000 children dying – it’s 10,000 MORE than would have died normally.

On top of that, says a UN report covered by Associated Press, to be published next month in the British medical journal Lancet, “more than 550,000 additional children each month are being struck by what is called wasting, according to the U.N. – malnutrition that manifests in spindly limbs and distended bellies.

Over a year, that is up 6.7 million from last year’s total of 47 million.

“Wasting and stunting can permanently damage children physically and mentally, transforming individual tragedies into a generational catastrophe.”

“The food security effects of the COVID crisis are going to reflect many years from now,” said Dr. Francesco Branca, the World Health Organization’s head of nutrition. “There is going to be a societal effect.”

Indeed, there has already been a societal effect. The pandemic has reversed a 40-year trend. Since 1980, the world’s infant mortality rate has been steadily dropping. Now it’s rising again.

But that’s still statistics. Let’s bring it back to individual deaths.

“Haboue Solange Boue is an infant who has lost half her former body weight of 5.5 pounds (2.5 kilograms) in the last month,” Lori Hinnant and Sam Mednick of AP wrote from Burkina Faso. “Her mother is too malnourished to nurse her. ‘My child,’ Danssanin Lanizou whispers, choking back tears as she unwraps a blanket to reveal her baby’s protruding ribs.

“The infant whimpers soundlessly,” Hinnant and Mednick write.

These children are not slipping softly away. They’re waking in the night, wailing because their stomachs are empty, and have been, for days. Maybe months.

They’re emaciated. Skin and bones bagged together. Too weak to go looking for food. Too weak to make a sound. Too weak even to brush away the fly that crawls across an eye or ventures into an open mouth.

I want to do something about it. I make monthly donations to UNICEF. I don’t know what else I can do. Except cry.

Jim Taylor is an Okanagan Centre author and freelance journalist. He can be reached at rewrite@shaw.ca.