Can we have less numbers and more stories, please?

The countries with more poverty and/or more inequality are facing a tough time in controlling the current Covid19 pandemic. Anyone living in the countries having an extremely high number of infected patients can confirm that people are less careful now than they were a few months back. Why is it like that? Of course, an obvious reason is that people are fed up with the long lockdown periods. We shall briefly discuss another possible reason, viz. statistics!

Because of my background and profession, I am a strong believer in numbers and statistics. We engineers can achieve amazing things by putting our trust in numbers. So much so that I would dare call myself a follower of dataism (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/npqu.12080)! I can trust my data. I can calculate the uncertainty of a circuit if I know the uncertainties of individual components. Then we can give an estimate of the number of years after which one would definitely need to consider replacing that circuit.  (I.e. I take numbers as input and give numbers as output!)

But, let us say you tell me that the fatality rate from road accidents in Cape Town is 47 per day and that in Delhi is 5. And then you ask me how more careful should I be on the roads of Cape Town? I do not think I have an answer. Or if you ask me what more should I do in Cape Town roads to be more careful? I do not know! Do these numbers make me 9 times more careful in Cape Town?! I am pretty sure it does not. What does it even mean? (I.e. do not expect behavioural outputs from me by giving me numbers as input!)

The point is that, as expounded elaborately in the book "Thinking, Fast and Slow", humans are not designed to appreciate statistics! This is a major reason why putting a lot of number in daily news helps no one. Rather it makes our mind numb and makes us more careless.

What can be done? Remember the statement by good old Stalin: "a single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistics"? Numbers rarely create emotions! What we need are more stories and fewer numbers. Even a single real story of real people will be more effective in hitting our empathy-spots and will help us relate to the realities. If we want qualitative output (of people becoming more careful and taking more precautions) then we need to give them qualitative input (of other people) and not quantitative. 

I would sincerely urge world-media to push more stories of Covid19 patients and their families: stories of both suffering and rejoice (on getting better), and try to limit the statistics.