Data counts, except when it doesn't

When all else fails, you still can count on numbers, right?

In our fact-challenged society, what counts as true has never been so fluid, yet we mostly know we can rely on cold, hard data - the stuff that either adds up or doesn't, the stuff that we can all quantify using the exact same system.

Certainly during the coronavirus pandemic, numbers have been a sacred currency. Each day, we are riveted and disturbed by the newest infection and death numbers, always broken down to the state and county level.

Each day, our governor and other somber officials announce the latest figures, which keep rising. Now, the official U.S. death count from COVID-19 surpasses all U.S. deaths in the Vietnam war. More people have died from complications related to the coronavirus than would be taken in dozens of 9/11's.

Quite simply, the numbers are shocking. But let's reflect on our daily dose of data.

Obviously, as testing capacity increases, so does the number of reported infections. Making sense of the disease's spread on this basis can be like counting the ants scurrying on the side of an anthill in a recent photo, and then drawing conclusions about how many are living underground. Good luck.

This puzzling data flow is subject to even more complication.

As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes at its website, even the most current death figures are based on the "current flow of mortality data," meaning that deaths can take days or even weeks to be properly reported and documented in uniform fashion.

This makes infection and death figures for any given window of time, particularly the last day or week, almost uniformly incomplete.

Even a positive case, counted on its own or with others, tells us little about the disease's path through southern Illinois communities. With symptoms sometimes taking up to two weeks to surface, our daily numbers are, at best, a snapshot of how the disease was moving through our area days or even weeks ago.

They tell you nothing about what's happening at Walmart or in your neighborhood today.

Obviously, the virus' death toll is nothing short of tragic. Now standing at more than 60,000 nationally (as of Thursday afternoon), the pandemic's cost has been catastrophic, but even these numbers deserve some perspective.

This year, according to the CDC, twice that many will die from Alzheimer's.

Nearly 200,000 will perish in car crashes and other accidents.

Nearly 650,000 Americans will die of heart disease in 2020 - more than all the combined military deaths during our long Civil War.

This isn't to minimize our current emergency, but our coronavirus numbers, updated urgently each day, are so shocking to us partly because they come quickly and abruptly.

Wars, accidents and plagues aside, we mostly deal with death on an incremental basis. Unless it touches us, we barely even notice it.

As the pandemic continues, get the facts you can, and seek the data you need to make informed decisions for you and your family. For all their opacity, the numbers can still tell you something worth knowing.

But perhaps in the same way data and statistics confuse our political processes and create double-bladed rhetorical weapons for use on Facebook, they also obscure our ability to understand this disease on a day-by-day basis.

Keep paying attention, but maybe on some days, it's OK to click off the televised daily briefing, take a deep breath and just go for a walk. Numbers are one thing, but keeping your sanity amid this data stream is something else entirely.

That, after all, still has to count for something.