The round figure zero of those who have died, day after day. The statistics would then report on the absence of death. Now, imagine a world in which that situation is turned on its head, and no one, but no one, dies. The statistics of death are confusing, and we may - and no doubt will - argue about them for a long time to come. A Financial Times analysis suggested that the virus had led to 45,000 deaths in the UK by 21st April, more than twice the official figure at that time, of 17,000. Some of these may have been coronavirus cases without obvious symptoms, or cases where doctors weren’t confident enough to mention COVID-19 on the death certificate, and these were left off the statistics for release by the government. According to an article in the New Scientist on 29 April, that left approximately a third of excess deaths unexplained. Figures from the UK’s Office for National Statistics indicate that the coronavirus was to blame for more than two-thirds of the excess deaths in England and Wales, based on the number of confirmed or suspected cases of COVID-19 reported on death certificates. There was not - and is still not - any reliable way of measuring the fatalities: no one has produced an algorithm to accurately record which of the ‘excess deaths’ are related to COVID and which are not (the term ‘excess deaths’ refers to those deaths above the figure normally to be expected for a given period among a population). This televised event was interesting for a number of reasons, not least because we now know that the statistics released each day in the solemn pantomime enacted by the Health Secretary, flanked on one side by the ghoulish Chris Witty and on the other by whoever was unfortunate enough to be dragged along for the press pummelling, were inaccurate. As the figures mounted, this morbid need to know became a habit, fed by a convention of news reporting in which any tragedy, any disaster, is measured by the number of its casualties.

Giovanni Pontiero: Vintage, 1997).ĭuring the opening weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, many of us tuned in every evening to hear the latest statistics of the newly infected and the dead.

In the first of a new two-part series about the similarities between fictional contagions and the current global pandemic, Richard Gwyn traces the truth of our new reality in José Saramago ’s Blindness (trans.

Blindness vintage saramago