Numbers and Narratives

GEORGE:
Today: Bills of Mortality in plague London—
and COVID dashboards in our century.
How counting the dead can help a society tell the truth…
and how counting can also numb the heart.

GEORGE:
Quick reminder: my Shakespeare can look back from the present day.
He can read scholarship, watch modern productions, react to modern claims—
but he cannot predict the future. No prophecy.

WILL:
I am allowed memory.
Not foresight.

George, one might say that numbers become a character in epidemics

GEORGE:
When plague strikes, people don’t only want comfort.
They want certainty.
And certainty often arrives wearing a disguise: a chart.

WILL:
Because a chart feels like a railing on a steep stair.
You clutch it, even if it won’t stop you from falling.

Transcript

“Numbers and Narratives: Bills of Mortality Then, Dashboards Now”

GEORGE (quiet, intimate):
Here is a sentence that sounds sensible—until you live through disaster:
“Let’s look at the numbers.”
Because numbers can inform.
Numbers can warn.
Numbers can save lives.
But numbers can also do something strange:
they can make tragedy feel tidy.

WILL (dry):
A column of figures is wonderfully calm.
The corpses are not.

GEORGE:
Today: Bills of Mortality in plague London—
and COVID dashboards in our century.
How counting the dead can help a society tell the truth…
and how counting can also numb the heart.

GEORGE:
Quick reminder: my Shakespeare can look back from the present day.
He can read scholarship, watch modern productions, react to modern claims—
but he cannot predict the future. No prophecy.

WILL:
I am allowed memory.
Not foresight.

George, one might say that numbers become a character in epidemics

GEORGE:
When plague strikes, people don’t only want comfort.
They want certainty.
And certainty often arrives wearing a disguise: a chart.

WILL:
Because a chart feels like a railing on a steep stair.
You clutch it, even if it won’t stop you from falling.

GEORGE:
Exactly.
So today we meet two “characters”:

the Bill of Mortality
and the COVID dashboard

Both are supposed to answer the same question:
“What is happening to us?”

GEORGE:
irst,e t’s go to London. Plague years.
Tell me what people had—what they could see.

WILL:
They could see funerals.
They could see shutters closed.
They could see a street that suddenly had too much space in it.

But to see the city as a whole—
they needed paper.

GEORGE:
The Bills of Mortality were essentially printed tallies of deaths, often weekly, associated with London and the Company of Parish Clerks—the people keeping parish burial records.

And what’s so eerie is: they didn’t only list plague.
They listed a whole catalog of causes—so the city could watch death like weather.

WILL:
A grim almanac.

GEORGE:
And people followed the bills.
They listened for the weekly count the way we watched case numbers.

WILL:
Of course.
A bill is not merely information.
It is permission to be afraid.

GEORGE:
And the Bills became foundational for early statistics.
John Graunt famously analyzed them in 1662 in Natural and Political Observations… upon the Bills of Mortality.

WILL:
Ah—so the dead became data, and the data became knowledge.

GEORGE:
Yes. And it’s hard to overstate the modern echo:
COVID turned millions of us into amateur epidemiologists overnight—
we learned curves, rates, “per 100,000,” positivity, hospital capacity—
and we refreshed dashboards like prayer beads.


GEORGE:
On January 22, 2020, the Johns Hopkins team publicly shared the early prototype of its COVID dashboard—
which became one of the defining symbols of the pandemic’s data culture.

WILL:
January 22.
So early.

GEORGE:
Early enough that the dashboard was tracking a still-emerging crisis.
And it set a pattern: real-time maps, totals, curves.

WILL:
A world made visible at once—
like standing on the moon and seeing the whole earth in one gaze.

GEORGE:
But that visibility came with a cost:
it trained people to seek certainty in numbers that were always incomplete, delayed, revised.

WILL:
So the numbers became both lantern and labyrinth.


GEORGE:
Reading One.
This is dramatized—meant to capture the experience of a household receiving the week’s bill.

WILL (soft):
Make it ordinary. Plague is always most terrible when it is ordinary.

GEORGE (reading, narrative tone):
“The paper comes into the shop like a visitor no one invited.
A boy runs it over. A man pays a penny.
Someone reads aloud.

At first, it sounds like bookkeeping—
parish names, columns, totals—
the language of order.

Then a word appears—
the word everyone pretends not to fear—
and the room tightens.

A woman stops folding cloth.
A man forgets his joke mid-sentence.
Someone says, ‘How many this week?’
And for a moment, the city becomes a single breath—
waiting for a number
that will decide how brave it must be.”

GEORGE (normal voice):
That’s the psychological reality.
A bill isn’t only information—
it’s a weekly ritual of dread.

WILL:
And the ritual teaches the body to live in suspense.

GEORGE:
Now we have to be honest about something:
counting deaths sounds objective, but it’s never purely objective.
Even in early modern London, observers understood that tallies could be uncertain.
Defoe—writing later about the 1665 plague—talks about the uncertainty of the Bills of Mortality and the difficulty of knowing what the numbers truly mean.

WILL:
Of course.
A number is only as truthful as the hands that gather it—
and the fears that bend those hands.

GEORGE:
Right. Causes could be misattributed, underreported, delayed.
Some households hid sickness; some officials were inconsistent; poverty distorted the record.

WILL:
And shame distorts everything.

Think of modern pandemic storytelling—films, news clips, documentaries—
there’s a recurring visual: the rising chart.

The chart is treated like a monster climbing the wall.

Will, what do you make of that?

WILL:
A chart is a convenient villain because it does not cry.
It does not beg.
It does not have a mother.
So the story can be dramatic without being intimate.

GEORGE:
And intimacy is the hard part.

WILL:
Yes.
A graph cannot show you the moment a man decides not to visit his friend.
A graph cannot show you the silence after a phone call ends.
A graph cannot show you a nurse’s hands shaking as she removes gloves.

GEORGE:
So charts are necessary… but incomplete theatre.

WILL:
Exactly.
And the danger is that the audience begins to believe the chart is the whole play.

George
“Numbers are neutral. Data speaks for itself.”

In other words: if we have the counts, we have the truth—
and any disagreement is just emotion or politics.

Will—how do you respond, from lived experience?

WILL (measured, firm):
I respond as a man who has watched people use “truth” as a weapon.

Numbers do not speak for themselves.
People speak through numbers.

GEORGE:
Explain that.

WILL:
First: what you count is a choice.
Second: how you count is a choice.
Third: what you refuse to count is also a choice.

GEORGE:
And that’s true in both eras.

For plague bills, the categories and causes are human labels—
a whole culture deciding what to call death.

For COVID dashboards, what’s included—cases, deaths, tests, hospitalizations, “probable” vs “confirmed,” reporting schedules—those are also human decisions.

WILL:
Yes.
And then comes the next layer: interpretation.

A man sees “500 deaths” and says, “That is too many.”
Another sees “500 deaths” and says, “That is less than yesterday.”
A third sees “500 deaths” and says, “Those are not real.”

GEORGE:
And in our world, dashboards can be astonishingly helpful—
but they can also create the illusion that what is measurable is what matters most.

WILL:
Exactly.
A city can become addicted to the appearance of control.

GEORGE:
There’s also a modern cautionary tale here about data infrastructure—during COVID, even journalists and experts pointed out how messy and inconsistent reporting systems could be, which affected trust and interpretation.

WILL:
Trust is the invisible medicine.
Without it, even the best number is bitter.

GEORGE:
Now here’s the twist I want listeners to sit with:
numbers can save lives by warning people early—
but numbers can also numb us if they become routine.

WILL:
A repeated tragedy becomes background noise
unless the heart fights to keep hearing it.

GEORGE:
So what’s the healthier claim?

WILL:
That numbers are tools.
Not gods.
A tool may guide your hand—
but it cannot tell you what kind of person you ought to be.

Permit me to “Refresh the dashboard” so to speak

GEORGE (reading):
“I refresh the page again.
The number changes by a handful, and I feel something in my stomach—
not because I know the people,
but because I know they existed.
I refresh again.
The map glows.
I pretend the glow is knowledge, and knowledge is safety.

I refresh again.
A friend texts: ‘Are you okay?’
And I realize I’ve been asking a website
a question that only a human voice can answer.”

WILL (soft):
A wise moment.
You cannot love a statistic—
but you can love a person.

GEORGE:
So here’s the episode’s promise:

Bills of Mortality helped London see itself—weekly, painfully—
and later allowed thinkers like John Graunt to turn grief into analysis.

Dashboards helped the modern world see the spread in near-real time—
and the Johns Hopkins dashboard became an early, influential model.

But numbers don’t replace meaning.
They don’t replace ethics.
They don’t replace compassion.

WILL:
And they do not replace courage, sir—
the quiet kind that continues even when the numbers are grim.

GEORGE:
Next episode: “The Social Contract.”
Who bears risk? Who gets protected?
What epidemics reveal about class, labor, and what we owe one another.

WILL:
Ah. The hardest subject of all—

GEORGE:
See you next time.