According to figures published on June 28, 128,100 people have died in the UK of Coronavirus. Who can understand this figure? Anything – whether number, event, dream or stone − is practically incomprehensible by itself. Comparison and relation of the similar and dissimilar are the tools of understanding.
But does it help to know that, in 1918, 228,000 died in Britain of the influenza pandemic? Or what is 128,100 when set beside the 67,100 British civilian deaths of WWII? Or how do the 67,100 sit beside 100,000, the number of civilians killed in a single night’s bombing of Tokyo in March 1945? Perhaps all we can do in the face of such blinding figures is think of the death of someone we have known. The only number we can compare 128,000 with is one. Each big number includes the same number of individually and communally experienced personal losses – these are palpable tears in the social fabric.
According to Montesquieu’s De l’Esprit des Lois (The Spirit of Laws), published in 1748, the principle that upholds that social fabric (at least in a republic) is the “love of virtue”. This is the confluence of moral and political virtue “in the sense that it points toward the general good”, and where such “love” exists it will be in this sense too that laws are made. Perhaps the former UK Secretary for Health and Care, Matt Hancock, was citing this spirit when on 10 January last year he claimed in an interview: “People need to not just follow the letter of the rules but follow the spirit as well and play their part”. According to Hancock, “Every time you try to flex the rules that could be fatal …” And of course he was right. A mere hug, just one fond kiss, can be deadly.
