The Abstract Art of Daily Death Counts

Every day they count the dead, update the figures.

3,739 dead in Iran.

10,372 in the United States.

41 in Luxembourg.

It’s a strange and morbid kind of calculus. The death toll is presented without context, without meaning. We’re not given the faces, the names, the weight of human suffering. Nor is this daily ritual an exercise in statistics; the data is unnormalized, raw, and, in any case, far too complex for most of us to parse in a mathematically meaningful way.

Instead the ritual of daily death counts is simply that: counting. This exercise has more in common with abstract art than it does with journalism or mathematics. The audience is left to construct their our own meaning.

Here is the figure.

This is how many are dead today.

Tomorrow, there will be more.