Now, I said it … a huge sigh of relief.
Only
engineers can understand why I said that. I am OK in manipulating numbers,
doing algebra problems etc. But understanding? No, I come up way short.
When
I heard for the first time the death estimates from COVID-19 in the US, I gave
it a shrug. This was not because I have very few connections to what goes on in
that faraway land in which I had spent more than 12 years of my life. Those
twelve years, for getting my Ph.D in civil engineering, most would assess as
wasted. But, I do not.
In
those twelve years I began to believe less in the exclusively, severely technocratic
view of the world and I started recognizing the possibility of other views,
equally or more valid than the views of math, science and technology I had
allowed to be foisted on me. This was a slow process, at glacial speed, one
might say.
But,
COVID-19 gave me a wake-up alarm.
Dr.
Fauci, an authority on infectious disease in a US government institution, said
that finally when the virus goes through its phases across the US, one could
see as many as between 100,000 and 250,000 deaths. I did not bat an eyelid; I did
a quick mental calculation and said it only (I should have written ONLY) about
.03% to 0,075% of the US population. Phew!, derision writ all over it.
I
did not value LIFE. I did not care to bother about lives far away, though I
knew too well that the virus will not let go India scot free. I thought all I
needed to do was to stay in my cocoon. I imagined I can do that and I am doing
that.
Check
that. I was doing that. When I started to think in terms of numbers instead of
percentages, in terms of lives – fully lived (this is kind of fuzzy),
partially lived (either climbing up or down a mountain side) and almost fully
to be lived – that was my personal Road to Damascus moment, but with
better consequences than what happened to Saul.
The
percentages of death in the US translate into nearly 500,000 to 1,250,000 for
India. Don’t laugh, the lower number is less than 1/5th of the
population of the district I currently reside in! That is, the lowest estimate
of total fatalities in the US if normalized to Indian population, cover, on
average, five districts (counties/parishes in the US) of India.
Five
Indian districts vanish from the map, population-wise. Kaboo…oom! Nothing to
sneeze at. Sneezing and COVID-19 – see the irony.
Oh,
there was another point on which I took exception to what Dr. Fauci mentioned.
The range. 100,000-250,000.
What
kind of a meaning can I get from that? None. That is like saying that my daily
commuting distance is between 90 km and 235 km (with the later I will be
reasonably close to Chennai, just another 90 km!). I hated a man-of-science
giving me this type of a range. Here too, my training in math, science and
technology intruded into my thinking (most uninvited, I justify now).
Then
I sat down and let the numbers sink in. I understood two things, one by one.
First,
not every situation should be analyzed invoking percentages. While 100,000
people is MERELY 0.03% of the US population, these are HUMAN LIVES I m reducing
to numbers. Tut, tut ...
Such
a conversion in this case is more than wrong. It is immoral. For some time
then, I was a co-passenger with Donald J. Trump on Air Force 1.
I
recoiled with horror. Explaining some things through numbers may be easy but neither
necessarily correct nor conscientious.
The
second lesson punctured my ego. I thought about the range Dr. Fauci was citing –
100,000 to 250,000. Could he have done better? No. This was the range that can
be seen post-facto to be correct.
I
will explain. When these numbers were thrown up, Dr. Fauci could not have known
what Trump would do (Trump himself does not know what he would do the next
moment), how much influence the CDC (Centre for Disease Control and Prevention)
would have over the population, if the recommendations were not accepted by the
president (which is the case in reality). That is, he had to include political uncertainty
in his calculations, that too, involving the US president who is a one-man roulette
wheel, in which the house always wins.
It
does not bother me that I missed the above two crucial factors in my initial
response to the prediction on deaths in the US due to COVID-19. I am well aware
that I am more than partially ignorant on many matters and this happened to be
one of them.
This
point onwards I will be very careful when I reduce numbers to percentages. And,
I will not thumb my nose on probability numbers thrown up by experts. I have to
keep this in mind when the next report of the United Nations Framework Convention
on Climate Change is issued. I hope to, by then, know more about statistics and
probability to be able to understand better what the report says.
Most
importantly, numbers can never represent human beings sufficiently.
Now,
I claim that I can understand numbers, thanks to COVID-19.
Raghuram
Ekambaram
2 comments:
I am not a 'number' person, which is an irony as I studied Economics and ask any economist, number crunching comes naturally to them.
Human lives are not mere statistics. Whether Covid or 'migrant' labour losing lives and livelihood. When will a collective we realise this, will we ever?
Aditi, I was in my late twenties when I realised what I wrote - a late bloomer. Better late than never. Thanks for endorsing my view point in your own way
Raghuram Ekambaram
Please read my next post also.
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