Counting the Dead

An average of 155,000 people die every day in the world, while about fifty million human beings die every year. Yet these deaths never hit the headlines unless they involve celebrities or terrorist attacks, earthquakes or similar disaster and, of course, the Covid-19. Counting the dead is now the main feature in the news, followed by the counting of infections and recoveries.

For several weeks daily updates of the above counting have been top news. On one side there are the numbers of corona virus dead and sick people, who receive all the attention, on the other the numbers of ordinary dead and sick people, devoid of any interest.

There is the macabre royalty of dead and sick people with a corona (crown), and ordinary dead and sick folks nobody cares about.

But death and disease, in the end, regardless of the cause, continues to be death and disease for all. And so it has always been and will be in this world.

In the linearity of time, the only certainty of every human being is death. It is certainly essential  to invest our resources to delay as much as possible  disease and death. Yet we can also ask ourselves whether survival at all costs should be truly our sole priority in life.

We can also ask ourselves what kind of information do we get from those numbers.

Numbers can tell you how many dead, infected and recovered people there are, yet they don’t say anything about the pain, terror, despair or even peace, joy resulted from their death, infections and recovery. It is not possible to count the amount of pain. A recovered person, who no longer has the virus, is considered healed. What counts is that this person is not ill or didn’t die because of the virus. They may be still very ill or die for some other reasons, yet nobody cares about that.

Counting the dead makes a lot of sense in linear times since on one side there are those who are dead and on the other those who are still alive. However, from a multidimensional perspective, which involves travelling through time, the counting of the dead does not make much sense. Whoever is alive now is going to die at a certain stage in linear time. Hence the counting of the dead is always the same of the whole population.

It may be very sad to be aware that whoever you see around is going to die, at least physically, including yourself. Yet this is the sheer reality and this Covid-19 may after all serve the purpose of being a reminder.