Statistics and Death - the miserable post.

Statistics are funny buggers aren't they? I learned this many years ago when I worked for MORI, the polling and market research agency. I distinctly remember how careful you had to be when presenting your project findings because clients were apt to claim all manner of wild and wonderful things to make interviewee responses suit their product or business plan.

You'll have seen the TV adverts that claim '98% of people said this product made them more beautiful / gave them an IQ of 200 / elongated their whatever...' and then underneath, almost apologetically, in brackets, and tiny letters, you'll see (of eleven people surveyed), there was lots of that at MORI.

You'll forgive me then, I hope, for taking the cavalcade of Coronavirus critics, strutting their stats on social media, with a pinch of salt.

Opinions are like arseholes: everybody's got one, most of them stink, and I'd really rather you didn't push it in my face if it's all the same. For that reason I'm not going to go into where I stand on the plethora of stats coming from every media outlet in the world, suffice it to say I think it's too early to discuss who did what well and who didn't with regard to the pandemic.

The one source I look at regularly, is the Worldometer website's Coronavirus updates. It gives me a way to look at what's happening in each country, compare them and rank them by a number of different factors including number of cases and deaths per million. Still I'm not sure if these are correct figures, I've just read that deaths in the UK have surpassed 40,000 today and yet this website tells me it's less than 35,000. I can't possibly know but by using one source (which I assume is unbiased) it at least gives some continuity.

It's easy to look at these numbers and forget that every integer is a person. The Top of the Pops of which is the worst country this week suddenly becomes rather grim when you take that onboard.

But how else are we supposed to deal with what's happening if we let ourselves get tied up in the reality of every individual case. We'd surely go mad.

When faced with large scale death we must employ coping mechanisms, otherwise how would someone be able to continue living after a war or genocide? How could someone work at an abattoir or be a grave digger?

Statistics become a defence strategy. We can't grieve for everyone.


Yesterday my youngest brother sent me a message to say that our dad had fallen. When you get to his age you don't just fall over, you have a fall. Fall is no longer a verb it becomes a noun. Having a fall is an event when you hit three score years and ten.

I got as much information from him as possible - the who what where when and why protocol - assessed the situation and let my uncle know. I took the decision not to call my dad last night and instead phoned him this morning.  I assumed he'd be fed up of telling the story again, he'd be sore and crotchety, and maybe even a bit embarrassed.

When I called him this morning he seemed in reasonable spirits. His voice sounded feeble but then it always does now. I asked him how it had happened and he told me that the biddies, the elderly woman he pays to clean for him and her ancient mother, had put a square of carpet down to cover a worn patch on the floor, he'd not known it was there, tripped on it and fallen, cracking his knee on the bedside table.

Thankfully my cousin was only a few minutes away as she'd been round to run some errands for him. She waited with him, and got a carer to come to attend who determined there was no need for a hospital visit.

Since then social services have agreed to come in twice a day instead of once, giving my cousin some respite and possibly alleviating the biddies from some of their duties.

My mum died when I was in my mid twenties, and despite having been treated for cancer for the best part of a year, it was a shock. It felt like it happened very quickly. It feels to me now like my dad has given up and is just waiting for his turn. There's no fight or frustration, just acceptance, which I struggle to understand. We've had the conversation about his funeral and whenever I speak to him there's nothing to say. He's stopped reading, he doesn't go out (though I suspect if he wanted to he could) and despite a polite interest in what I'm doing, the conversation has all but stopped.

The speed that my mum went - four days after the final incident - was difficult to deal with but likewise this drawn out affair is tough. I just hope it doesn't happen before the country opens up again, I feel like I should see him again.