Deaths are not in vain

My friend of 29 years passed away recently, taking the number of people known to me dying due to Covid-19 to 10. How many people do I know directly, I don't know the number. Does anyone count the number of people they know? Knowing someone is multifactorial. It is philosophical, statistical and probably a neurological question. British anthropologist Robin Dunbar suggested a cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable (positive or negative) social relationships. Dunbar's number of connections was first proposed in the 1990s by correlating primate brain dimension and its average social group size. It was conjectured that humans can stably maintain about 150 relationships.

I knew the ten people who died of Covid personally but probably not enough to say they were all in my close circle of 150. Some were were close, but most were not. They were in the first and the second layer in a fuzzy mix. What is the average number of this mix in a population? I do not know. Let us assume it is ten times the Dunbar number. Then we could argue that the ten people I knew who died of Covid-19 were in a group of 1,500, which comes to about 0.6%. I am not an outlier. I made a few phone calls to friends and relatives to figure out how many people they knew had died of Covid-19. The number 10 seemed average.

Long back, the brilliant physicist Richard Feynman had articulated a generic maxim that is apt for today's India. Science is a culture of doubt, and religion is a culture of faith, he mildly wrote. In contrast, we are told to believe what the government says without batting an eyelid as if "governance is a culture of faith". The number of deaths mentioned in the government database is close to 3 lakhs. Some epidemiology modellers say the number is ten times more, some even higher. About two-thirds of the Indian population is in the age group of 20 to 70. This number is about 90 crores. Admittedly, all of them do not have an extensive network like a city-bred person like me. Also, there are some overlaps between networks. With about 50% of the people living in large cities and towns, one can use a conservative number of 45 crores Indians with an extended interaction family of 1,500. If one uses the 0.6% death in a network, the total number of deaths is around 30 lakhs. Is this number valid? It may be an overestimate, but from images of floating bodies in Ganga and continuous burning pyres cremation grounds, it is apparent that something is seriously amiss.

Death from Covid is secular and caste independent and probably somewhat gender-biased towards men. Probably nature and the soul of India has their way to tell us where we faltered. Our fragmented society divided by caste, religion and bigotry is crying for integration. Deaths from Covid-19 will not be in vain.