Covid Report = Weather Report
Why Covid case numbers stopped being meaningful.
As the pandemic drags on, our brain individually and our norms collectively can't really fathom the numbers everyday. We stopped looking at the absolute numbers even though the daily case number is higher than a week during the initial MCO.
What we see now is that the number is higher or lower than the day before - that's pretty much what we can digest. It's a bit like:
- "Oh today is hotter/colder than yesterday."
- "That district is hotter than mine."
- "That state is in a great flood."
Probably this is Dunbar's number at work - which states that typically an individual can hold meaningful connection with 150 people. After that, we can't really connect at the personal level - it's just statistics.