COVID Conversations - The Pinball Effect

Right now, when it comes to C-19 numbers, I think the world is being subjected to what I have been thinking of as "The Pinball Effect".

The Pinball Effect is a term I coined in my own mind, and it doesn't have to do with things bouncing around. It has to do with numbers. Older folkses will remember that vintage pinball machines had nice reasonable numbers on them. In the hundreds. Thousands were really really high scores.

Then in the advent of the video game era, when we had electronic pinball games, those numbers started to get ridiculous. Pinball game scores were now in the millions! It was just ridiculous. The numbers ceased to have meaning any more because every *beep* *boop* *PING!* was, like, 10,000 points. End scores were stupid high. It wasn't even exciting any more, really, when a number racked up. Numbers didn't have impact.

In the modern age, we don't talk in tens or hundreds. Thousands don't thrill. When we talk about money or sales units or scores, we speak in millions, Billions, or TRILLIONS. So tens, or hundreds, or thousands doesn't sound like much.

EVEN WHEN WE TALK ABOUT LIVES.

And it fucking SICKENS me that when we are talking about LIVES, talking about hundreds to THOUSANDS of people dying A DAY of a disease, people are like "Whatever, they said it would be worse, so we should just get back to life already." Or they look at the worldwide death toll of 230,000+ to date and they say, "Oh, well they said it would be over a MILLION, and it's not, so it's NOT A BIG DEAL. Calm down, let's get back to it."

First of all, it's this "low" BECAUSE WE QUARANTINED and so many of us still are. The fact that flies over so many people's heads is just...ugh. I can't even begin to...

And second of all, this isn't a score on a pinball machine. These are HUMAN GODDAMN LIVES. 230,000 PEOPLE WHO WERE LIVING AND BREATHING. And we have every reason to believe this is not the full number and it is in fact higher.

But that number doesn't sound like anything to people any more. It's beep boop blip so high. And because of the news headlines--which rightly warned us it could be much, much worse--also so low at the same time. It ceases to have any context any more.

Then I want to pull it back, and say okay...so how many people work in your office building? Or how many people do you see in your church every week? Here's a number you can wrap your head around:

We had 2390 deaths just yesterday in the US alone. More than the population of many people's entire office buildings, and more than many people's entire church populations. In one day. And it has been this way every day for WEEKS. And that was just in the US. And that was while many states were under quarantine and taking precautions.

What number do you need to hear? What pile of bodies do you need to see to make it real to you?

This isn't a game.