That’s an important benchmark. But it’s also potentially a hugely misleading one. It does not mean that COVID-19 is “only as bad” as seasonal flu. The statistics may prompt some to say, hey, the numbers are the same as for seasonal flu; this global shutdown was unnecessary. A more accurate statement would be, good grief, even despite a global shutdown, we have the same numbers as for seasonal flu.
Arguably more important than the number of people who have been lost is how many people have been saved.
We will never really know what would have happened on a planet that took no action against this pandemic. But one early model estimated that 40 million people would die from COVID-19 in 2020 if absolutely no measures, like social distancing, were undertaken. For comparison, in 2017, 56 million people died globally from any and all causes, from accidents to disease to old age.
By the end of March, one study estimated that up to 120,000 deaths had been avoided in Europe alone thanks to measures like closing schools and social distancing. Globally, by now, perhaps it is millions.
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The mental gymnastics needed to accommodate and compare such numbers can be intense. I am a science journalist who has a reasonable grasp on statistics, exponential growth, and some epidemiology. But I find myself grappling with whether the numbers are small or large , comforting or frightening. Preventing all death is impossible; taking no steps to prevent any death is unethical. Where are we, exactly, on that spectrum?
A contagious disease with exponential growth can get very bad very quickly. In Canada, the number of COVID-19 deaths doubled every three to five days or so in the early part of the pandemic, though by the end of April it had reached about two weeks (doubling times vary a lot from country to country, and they change over time). A week can make a huge difference.
And it’s the later weeks that look so much more frightening than the earlier ones. For example, imagine a massive sports stadium with just one person in it, and then imagine doubling the number of people every five days. For the first couple of months you have a manageable group of less than 5,000 people and things don’t seem so crowded. By the third month, the stadium is filled with 260,000 people. After 100 days, you have one million people; at 150 days, it’s one billion (the population of China is 1.4 billion). Part way through the sixth month you surpass the global population.
Hundreds of thousands of deaths are of course appalling, and for those personally affected by COVID-19, they are entirely unacceptable. Yet societies accommodate this level of preventable death all the time in their public policies. From car accidents to diseases that could be beaten back by exercise and better diets, societies weigh up the pros and cons of different rules and regulations to decide what is “acceptable.” How much personal freedom in what we do and how we eat are we willing to see restricted to save hundreds of thousands of lives?
Globally, 1.25 million people die on the road from fatal crashes annually, with speed as a major factor. As a broad rule of thumb, reducing speed limits by 10 per cent reduces fatal crashes by a whopping 40 per cent : decreasing speed limits just this little bit could in theory save 480,000 lives. Safety gets weighed against society’s desire to get quickly from one place to another, peoples’ comfort with speed, and the expediency of transporting goods, to arrive at some compromise of a “reasonable” speed limit.
