The public debate around COVID-19 demonstrates our ongoing and misplaced trust in numbers

COVID-19 data and numbers are everywhere. However, these numbers are also a source of debate and subject to vastly different interpretations. Every day we are posed with a question that divides even epidemiologists: what does it really mean that positive cases or mortalities are up or down? Yet the media and the public reads deep meanings into these numbers, as officials are praised or chastised based on them. Far from being self-evident and informative, Ville Aula, argues these statistics leave the public with mere spectacle, and highlights the misplaced trust that we all place in numbers.