Captivated by Numbers

We are seeing a lot of graphs these days.  Graphs portray numbers visually.  They represent facts and suggest trends.  With a graph you can see the measure of some slice of reality, what has happened and what is likely to happen next.  Graphs have become part of our language and our thoughts.   “Flattening the curve” means more today than it ever did.  When you talk of deaths caused by Coronavirus, flattening the curve means saving lives by reducing lives lost to the pandemic. 

Since March, I have been glued to the news.  I have not paid this much attention to media coverage of world events since the Vietnam War over fifty years ago.

While the war was far away in Southeast Asia the conflict affected me directly.  American men were dying in Vietnam.  I was fast approaching draft age, and at age 18 I would graduate into the highest risk category of all.  Young men my age were being forced into the military, sent to Vietnam, and killed.

Today’s threat to Americans threatens all humans on the globe.  Coronavirus does not discriminate between who it attacks, but the most at risk of dying from the virus are older people.  Ironically, at age 68, that puts me in the high-risk category again.

My kids remind me of that all the time.  They quiz my wife and I about our behavior and scold us if they think we are taking undue risk.  They worry about losing their mother and me to this disease.
      

As if fear and grief can be represented by numbers, human beings measure horrible threats by counting deaths.  Raw data, in this case the number of lives lost to the pandemic may act as a rough indicator of harm, but it fails miserably at representing the damage radiating from each soul ripped from us prematurely.

Needless death traumatizes families, caregivers, faith organizations, and whole communities with lasting effect.  Yet our data driven world persists in finding one number that matters most.  My most watched scorecard these days is the daily number of Coronavirus deaths in America.  They roll up like dollars on a TV charity telethon tote board, or numbers on the dials of old mechanical automobile odometers. 

   

Every time a writer (including me) puts up an aggregate number of deaths there should be a disclaimer that goes with it lest our humanity gets lost in the math.  Maybe this.

The reader is asked to remember that these numbers are made up of individual deaths.  Each by itself, one piled on top of another, represents a call to the deceased’s spouse, parents, extended family, friends, lovers, classmates, acquaintances.  Each death results in shock, grief, an obituary, funeral ceremonies if allowed, lifelong trauma, and a lessening of our humanity.  The effect of those deaths is not singular but exponential.

 

We now believe the first person died in America from Coronavirus on January 25, 2020.  At least that is when we started counting.  On April 28^th, 94 days later, 58,947 were dead from the Coronavirus. On that day, the pandemic in America eclipsed the 58,319 deaths we suffered in Vietnam.  Numerical fact.  That number has been tattooed somewhere in my brain for some time now.

On April 29^th, the very next day after the pandemic in America exceeded American deaths in Vietnam, Jared Kushner, the President’s son in law, said this to Fox News.

“This is a great success story, and I think that’s really what needs to be told.”

I am posting this on July 7, 2020.   As of yesterday, 132,573 Americans had died from the pandemic.  It continues and will continue to grow.  Our country has now lost more than twice the number of Americans killed in Vietnam and is, I’m afraid, on its way to tripling that awful number.  The curve has not flattened.  I don’t think “success story” will be among the words used to describe this time in America’s history.

Can we compare lives lost in a struggle with a rampant virus to deaths in a political armed conflict?  Let me give it a try.

The arc of American deaths in Vietnam occurred over twenty years.  The first American died as a result of the Vietnam conflict in 1955.  Injuries which caused the last death occurred in 1975.

“Flattening of the curve” was not a concept I recall discussing then.  We just wanted the war to end.  During five of those twenty years, 1966-1971, 47.5% of all the deaths over 20 years occurred.  That is a total of 27,717 American young people killed, primarily young men, up to 30% of them drafted.  Countless more enlisted to avoid the draft, trying desperately to take some control over their future.

 

It had better be damn important, whatever the event in question, to risk such an outcome, to suffer that amount of sheer human loss, don’t you think?

I did a little research and asked my son Dean, who is studying data science, to take the data I found and make a graph of Americans killed in action in Vietnam by month during those five years.  A graph like the ones we see so often today about the Coronavirus pandemic.  

 

We have for years touted that we strive to make decisions “based on data” while then continuing to do what is politically or economically expedient.  Data is supposedly considered, but too many decisions are still made based on intuition.  Hunches are played, like bets in a casino, with the most important of matters.  Life and death being one.

I think we were powerless to stop this virus entering our country, spreading through the population, and killing vulnerable people among us.  What was in our power was to minimize it through effective leadership, sound policy, and the wise use of resources.  What we had hoped to see, as time went on and we learned more about the virus, was deaths going down.  Flattening the curve would save lives.

 

We had a lot more control of the fate of our soldiers in Vietnam.  During the month of January 1966,

196 Americans were killed in Vietnam.  I was 14.  The American public would not see another monthly death total that low until I was 20, in October of 1971, nearly six years later.  How did America allow that to happen?  And why?

Between those two dates, monthly deaths rose steadily.  1967 began with 403 deaths in January and ended with 486 in December, with more Americans dying each successive month than the last. That steady monthly increase would continue until the worst monthly death toll of the war, April of 1969.

In April of 1969 I was three months away from graduating high school.  Early in May, we learned that 543 Americans were killed the previous month.  And then they began to drop, agonizingly slowly, finally falling below 200 (ironically to 196) in October 1971.  To see the rise and fall of Americans Killed in Action in Vietnam during the worst five years of the war (Jan. 1966-Dec. 1971) look at this.

 

America’s role in the Vietnam War started under Dwight Eisenhower in 1955, grew during John F. Kennedy’s almost three years as President, expanded and peaked during Lyndon Johnson’s five years, continued during Richard Nixon’s five and a half years, and finally ended under Gerald Ford on April 30, 1975. The graph above represents the worst five years for American deaths.

The President in office for the majority of those awful five years, and thus responsible for those deaths, was Lyndon Johnson.  He expanded the war, increased the draft, sent more American young men to Vietnam, began heavy aerial bombing campaigns, and trusted his generals and the Secretary of the Department of Defense, Robert MacNamara, when they assured him they were about to gain the upper hand in the conflict.  “Light at the end of the tunnel” was LBJ’s catchphrase.  As Johnson’s presidency went on, that light grew dimmer and dimmer.

So how was the curve flattened in Vietnam?  Americans, led by young people, protested the war and opposed Johnson and his Democratic administration.  The human price paid for success in Vietnam, always ill defined, finally became too high for Americans to accept.

    

Large and sustained protests took place across the country against the war and were coupled with relentless reporting by journalists on the reality of the situation in Vietnam and the decisions made by the Johnson Administration.  The real tragedy is not that America lost the war, but how long it took to bring it to an end.

Lyndon Johnson, facing likely defeat, announced he would not run for re-election as President.  At a bloody convention in Chicago where protestors, largely students, were beaten mercilessly the Democrats selected Hubert Humphrey as their candidate.  Republican Richard Nixon, claiming he had a “secret plan” to end the war, became President in January of 1969.

The Vietnam War continued throughout Nixon's presidency, which ended on August 9, 1974 when he was abandoned by the Republican party and resigned facing certain impeachment. His Vice President and successor, Gerald Ford signed a peace agreement and ordered U.S. troops out of Vietnam on May 7, 1975.

It took five years and two months for the war come to an end after Nixon was elected on the promise of bringing the troops home. During that time another 14,000+ Americans died in Vietnam.

The outcome of the war following America’s final withdrawal was the immediate reunification of Vietnam.  North Vietnam took over South Vietnam almost the day the United States left.  That result would likely have taken place regardless of when America decided to leave.  Why did we wait so long?

How many Americans died needlessly in Vietnam?  You can’t calculate a number.  But you can mourn their loss.

The number of Americans lost in Vietnam, 58,319, is a number I keep in my head.  When I walked into work the morning of September 11, 2001 and learned the World Trade Center’s twin towers were on fire, and soon to collapse, I asked my staff how many workers those office buildings held.

“Why are you thinking of that?” one asked.

“Because we lost 58,319 Americans in Vietnam.  If we lose more than that today it will be America’s worst tragedy ever.”

As it turned out 2,996 Americans died on that day.

In Korea, America's death count was 36,574.

I kept a running count, updated weekly, of Americans killed in the Iraq War on my office door at work.  Iraq was another conflict I believed unnecessary and misguided.  That number ended at 3,836.

America’s intervention in Afghanistan cost the lives of 2,372 military personnel and another 1,720 civilian contractors for a total of 4,092. 

The Vietnam War was America’s most deadly conflict since World War II, taking from us 58,319 Americans while accomplishing little if anything.

How many Americans will die needlessly during the Coronavirus pandemic from a lack of effective leadership, the absence of sound policy based on data and science, and the poor use of resources by our government?

You cannot calculate a number.  But you can mourn their loss.

And like America's reaction to lives lost in Vietnam, you can guarantee those responsible for these needless deaths pay a heavy political price for their ineptness.