I do not understand numbers

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 1/5^th 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