Attempting to get an intuitive picture of COVID deaths

on covid, rate, and daily

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

I can’t at least hold a million in my head or the value which is 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 died per thousand: . For the UK this number is less than one, which leads us into partial person territory.

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

Or if all those people lined up for double decker buses it would take buses to move them all. Or Boeing 737’s to get them all in the air which would make these planes % of the traffic in the air.

I came across a video where school children gathered paperclips for each death in the Holocaust. And 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 scrolling helped it a little more real for me.