The story of COVID-19
COVID-19 resembles these other outbreaks and pandemics, but the news stories about it seem to have a distinctively numerical quality. The number of known infections in a particular place over a period of time gives an index of the transmissibility of an infection. Mortality rates – a measure of the proportion of people that die with an infection – are also woven into pandemic stories, in general. But COVID-19’s numbers seem to be its story. News feeds continually update the counts of diagnoses and deaths, and have numerically tracked the contagion from a supposed source in China to other countries, notably South Korea, Iran and Italy, and then to most other parts of the world. This pandemic by numbers approach charts the particular transmissibility and severity of this virus, but also lends itself to our increasingly complex small-screen media diet, where numbers and graphs alongside images and videos more easily convey the COVID-19 story than do long form narrative texts.
