Attempting to get an intuitive picture of COVID deaths

on covid, rate, and daily

Most of us have heard the quote “A Single Death is a Tragedy; a Million Deaths is a Statistic”. Let’s see if we can change that.

I can’t truly hold a million in my head, nor can I grasp the value which represents today’s (2020-06-24) cumulative deaths in the UK with a population of . (Feel free to update these numbers with the values of your country.)

The first thing I thought about is how many deaths occurred per thousand people. For the UK this number is less than one, which is hard to visualize.

Maybe thinking about a crowd would help. The capacity of Old Trafford (the stadium of Manchester United) is 74,879, which means if we apply the death rate here, % of a full stadium would have died.

Or if all those people boarded double-decker buses, it would take buses to transport them all. Or Boeing 737s to get them all airborne, which would represent % of global air traffic.

I came across a video where schoolchildren gathered paperclips to represent each death in the Holocaust, and I thought I would do something similar here. Each asterisk below represents a life that has been lost to this disease.

Hopefully that helps. The long scroll made it feel more tangible for me.