It is inevitable that with the Covid-19 death count which is about to hit 90,000 that before too long it will hit 100,000. This will be a milestone (noting that a mile at 5280 feet is not a round number, thought it originated from the Roman mille passus, or “thousand paces,” which measured 5,000 Roman feet) because there is a human proclivity to like, or in this case to hate, round numbers.
This, it turns out has been reported on. For example:
Excerpt about why people like to think in terms of round number:
“They’re great guideposts if you’re looking at goals, if you’re aiming for something,” Alter said. “To lose a certain amount of weight, to run a marathon at a certain pace. They’re very powerful, they’re very visible, and they’re easy to recall and remember.”
Our world is dominated by the base-10 system, or the decimal system. We use it all the time to estimate expenses, negotiate our salary, or talk about our age.
“We talk about being in our 30s, and our 40s, and our 50s. We don’t talk about being in our 37s,” said Eugenia Cheng, a scientist in residence at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
So why is our system based on 10s anyway? Experts agree that it’s because of an evolutionary accident.
“It’s very intimately linked to the fact that we have 10 fingers,” Cheng said.
It makes sense since we learn how to count on our digits. Counting in ones, tens, hundreds, thousands, comes so natural to us now that we tend to forget that there are alternatives to the 10-based system..
This is why it should resonate with people and make headlines when 100,000 people in the United States die of Covid-19.
When the headlines read 90,000 die of Covid-19 probably in the next day or two I wonder how Trump will try to spin this. Will blaming it on Barack Obama work, or attempting to deflect to some inane and insane Obamagate conspiracy allegation be effective? Who knows? It will no doubt work with some.
On MSNBC Joy Reid talked about the 90,000 number this morning and it is the main story on their website, but until Fox News spends time addressing it Trump won’t care.
This is from The Washington Post:
Excerpts:
Over the course of a week, as the national death toll from covid-19 marched steadily toward 90,000, President Trump returned repeatedly to the idea that America is at war with the coronavirus. At a mask factory in Arizona on May 5, an event honoring nurses the next day in the Oval Office and a wreath-laying at the National World War II Memorial two days later, he said that Americans should think of ourselves as “warriors,” because “we can’t keep our country closed down for years,” and that, as we have in the past, we would “triumph.”
But if we are all warriors, why aren’t the currently more than 86,000 American pandemic dead treated as patriots and honored for their sacrifices? The metaphor appears to stop at death’s door.
The power of national mourning is not unique to the United States, but it is heightened here, made more potent by the rarity of common bonds among a sprawling and diverse population. In his first inaugural address, President Abraham Lincoln famously appealed to the bonds that do exist as the “mystic chords of memory” — ties that stretch “from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land.”
China recently observed a National Day of Mourning, and Spain plans to have a period of mourning when its lockdown eases. In the United States, we have not had so much as a collective moment of silence, even as the number of covid-19 deaths exceeded the number of Americans killed in the Vietnam War.
Trump, who likens himself to Lincoln and who had the audacity to be interviewed inside the Lincoln Memorial, has not called for a national day of mourning. Will it take 100,000 deaths for him to do this?
100,000 is the round number he has to begin to plan for because he’d already have played all the cards in his deck, or used all the tools in his toolbox (select your own metaphor) when even if Fox News ignore it the story will be breaking news everywhere else. It will prompt magazine covers and of more concern to Trump across the page newspaper headlines in local papers in areas where he is popular.
Trump, if he bothers to look at it, can’t feel sanguine about the May 16th numbers on the CDC website because, after all 90,000 is a number bit it isn't the big enchilada (Mexican metaphor used on purpose) of round numbers which is coming soon.
Trump especially won’t be happy about the state by state map:
I assume he has the power in his biggest brain to figure out the color code:
How willTrump deal with the inevitable round number of 100,000 deaths soon to come. How will his supporters react?
As the numbers of both case and deaths hit the states where Trump and his Republican governors increase exponentially I hope and suspect that some people will begin to question taking Trump at his word that it was safe to reopen. What do you think (take the poll)?
Yesterday