A screenshot: Coronavirus Update (Live): 858,669 Cases and 42,151 Deaths from COVID-19 Virus Outbreak.
That's an increase in 24 hours of 72,957 cases and 4,337 deaths.
As Josef Stalin famously observed, "One death is a tragedy. A million deaths are a statistic." As the case numbers grow, they become more abstract. I will try to pay less attention to the count and more to the response—to what people and governments are doing or not doing.
Future historians of this pandemic will have some crude estimate of the final toll, but it will be about as precise as those we read for the Spanish flu: 50 to 100 million, give or take a few million. Just statistics, like the 4,337 tragedies we have endured in the past 24 hours.
