I get asked a lot about why people aren't responding to the growing COVID counts, so a thread hypothesizing why it's hard for some to "see" that COVID is real despite nearly 400k dead (using LA County as an example) 1/12

Some of this is fatigue and a difficulty wrapping one's head around the numbers. Many of us are out here making comparisons to try to bring some reality to the abstractions 2/12

I'm thinking here of @cydharrell's City of the Pandemic Lost effort, or COVID Ghost Town by @MattBoggie http://mattboggie.com/ghosttown/  I've mentioned that we have a national "anti-heartbeat" with 1 then 2 deaths per minute. I noted the acreage we'd need to memorialize the losses 3/12

scholars have pointed to the way that people respond to disaster, for example @LucyGoBag's discussion of the trauma we're all in the midst of, or @PaulatDR's work on the response engendered by trauma/crisis numbers 4/12

I was thinking today about how previous pandemics have been understood. I often talk about how smaller scale counting provided a 'geography of death' - so in the 17th century counts were essentially by neighborhood in London, for example 5/12

this provided people with actionable information that is different than national or global scale dashboards. But it was also the case that people literally saw the dead in the streets as they walked home from dinner or work 6/12

in my most generous moments I think that so many of us here in the US never see COVID except in numbers. For example, LA County is DENSE: 2,506 people per square mile in LA County estimated for 2020 and COVID is widespread 7/12

But even there we're talking (right now) about 2.9 deaths over the last year per square mile. Now people don't live evenly dispersed, so this is a heuristic or useful fiction, but I think it's useful to think with. 8/12

there are 2,506 people per sq mi in LA country - I guarantee that no one knows all the people "in their mile" and that makes it entirely possible for 3 people to die over the course of a year within a person's mile without them knowing. 9/12

just 7% of the US population has been infected with COVID (based on reported cases) and far fewer have died. I'm all too mindful of how many have died, so much so that I won't put the % in here b/c it looks so low (that in itself is weird: big # little %) 10/12

I am constantly looking for ways to make it possible for the abstract numbers to break through to groups outside of my own and I think we need to acknowledge that personal experience matters a lot for some. People trust their eyes - how can we help them see? 11/12

those 400,000 people matter - every single one of them. They deserved to have the chance to live. How can we help people who are trusting their eyes and not seeing anyone near them or in their networks get sick learn to see otherwise? fin/12

Here's one way: https://twitter.com/USofDisaster/status/1351277364681039879?s=20