Statistics – my only solace in a world gripped by a deadly pandemic

Over the course of my lengthy and occasionally eventful life, I have faced a few stressful and terrifying situations. Fortunately, I’ve have usually found something to cling to for comfort as I face my fears. 

As a child the night before my first ever aeroplane flight, I clutched a stuffed piglet named Archie.

Later in Hawaii, the night of the first big-wave swell of the season, as we felt the thud of massive surf pulsing through the earth, I held fast to my warm and gorgeous lady friend who was from Denmark, but half Saudi Arabian. 

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Today, as a middle aged social media addict faced with a global pandemic, I have a more interpretive teddy bear to hold on to. I cling to statistics!

Spreadsheets, bar charts, line graphs, histograms… I peer into them like they are crystal balls, like these arcane, mathematical ouija boards. I see in them what I need to see and they give me solace.

The insights are provided by a range of analysts – both amateur and professional – scraping official figures then packaging them for our information. 

But I am not here to be informed! This is the Covid-19 Global Pandemic we’re talking about here. I don’t need information – there is more than enough of that.

I need reassurance.

Like the six-year-old boy who was boarding a Boeing 747 the next morning, I want to be told that everything is going to be fine. And I need something to cling to.

Statistics are that thing. And I don’t believe I am alone in this.

There is something so soothing about quantitative data – particularly when you are terrified – and those numbers imply we’re past the peak of the pandemic. 

“Everybody needs a bosom for a pillow. Everybody needs a bosom,” sang 1990s indie-pop band Cornershop on their solitary hit, Brimful Of Asher.

For me that bosom is an Excel spreadsheet showing a plethora of pandemic metrics, with somewhere, nestling in one of the columns, something to be optimistic about.

Something to interpret positively. A shred of hope amidst this blizzard of terrible news.

Deaths is now coming thick and fast on every channel. A friend, a colleague, two business clients. A friend’s dad, two dads, three dads dead. Some near misses, a ventilator survived. Now this guy’s kids, a mercy both survived. 

The injunctions to stay home, avoid society, isolate, to quarantine. But still life makes its demands. A child to be fetched, court, an errand, a grocery run, a technical repair… 

And through it all the visceral fear, the knowing that you are not special, not particularly fit; privileged but not rich enough to escape. This thing will come for you as sure as it has for all those others. And then we will really see!

Unless… unless we’ve dodged the bullet. Unless this unforgiving wave has crested, broken, passed its peak. Perhaps we’re past the worst. I mean look… if you check this stat…

Vaccinations passing 5%, test positivity 26.5! This might mean Gauteng has peaked. Admissions down in Eastern Cape!

Like a mirror of my realest self, my stats reflect my deepest fears, my clinging need. What a parent once lied to me about. 

I know professionally that we can make statistics tell us almost anything. And that’s why I choose statistics to rock myself to sleep with every night.

Like Archie the piglet that night, just to make believe that most impossible thing… that everything’s going to be alright.

Hagen Engler.