The numbers, Judy! Tell me the numbers today! The numbers tell me everything I need to know about how the day will go. Are they up, are they down, are they better, are they worse. I need to know how the numbers are doing or my day is incomplete. What would happen to me if I didn't know the numbers that day? What if the numbers catch me unaware, and sneak up on me from behind? I have to be prepared for whatever the numbers say, not so that I can change my behavior, but so that I can have a correctly calibrated sense of alarm as I sit at home.

There are so many numbers now that dictate life or death. Daily case and death counts. Total hospitalizations. IFR, CFR, R0, test positivity rate, false positive and false negative rates. Seeing bad numbers can set my mind racing, making it difficult to think about anything except THE NUMBERS. My life has always been dominated by numbers, the more normal numbers of GPA, FIDE rating, BTC, $SPY, horsepower, EBITDA, conversion rate, training accuracy, p-values, and the like. I have always been a numerate person. I breezed through math courses until hitting upper division Partial Differential Equations. But lately the overflow of numbers has taken on something of a surreal quality.

The rapid fire pace of new developments, and the divergence between my overwhelmingly boring personal daily lived experience and what I intellectually know to be happening out in the world, has caused a rift between what I know is true and how prepared I am to face it. The daily uncertainty of not knowing the answer to if my parents or friends are going to get sick is wearing on me, despite the fact that I can easily estimate their risk based on their general health, age, demographics, and adherence to general safety precautions. This feeling of the normal rules being suspended and life no longer being real is all too familiar to me.

I have felt derealization before. Extended periods of isolation or uncertainty can bring a strange sensation that the world is behind glass. I reach out my hand trying to grab onto something real, but come up with the empty idea that the world has frozen in time, unalterable and alien and timeless, while I am trapped outside it. One of my most acute memories of temporary derealization may be one familiar to New Yorkers: the drunken 2am subway ride home. The late night trains take what seems like forever to arrive while a bizarre parade of confusing and occasionally threatening subway creatures pass by. While waiting in the oppressive heat and dark of the broken down and dirty tunnel, it's easy to lose all sense of time and perspective. I come to the realization that I am no longer an individual with free will, but an automaton that has always and will always be trapped in subway purgatory, waiting for a train that will never arrive as sweat drips down the back of my neck. There is no self, just the all enveloping wait for something to happen.

The covid 19 lockdown has been ongoing for endless months of waiting and watching, just like the subway. I keep looking at the numbers, because they are a link to an objective reality that exists outside of my small internal world. The numbers dictate when life can resume, when I can see my family again, and when I can think about life plans again. But while I know they are real, they also are very much not real; they are the shadows on a cave wall that represent one singular view of the lives of billions of people and millions of grieving families. But there is also the feeling that they are completely out of the control of any human. The numbers, the deaths, the suffering, are the work of implacable laws of nature like logistic curves and the buoyancy of viral particles as a function of relative humidity and temperature.

The vaccines are coming, just like the subway will arrive sometime. But knowing that the subway is arriving in 14 minutes is almost meaningless when time itself is interminable. Borrowing from the words of the excellent writer Sarah Zhang , we are now in vaccine purgatory. The end is in sight, but there is enough uncertainty to make it feel illusory and impossible. The distribution rules are confusing and uncertain. There is an untenable amount of faith and hope required that an administration that has failed in such a complete and unbelievable fashion will now perform one of the largest and most accelerated logistics and public relations problems in human history. The first subway trip I took in NYC as an adult was figuratively derailed by a trash fire during a record summer heat wave, and while there are reasons to believe that the rest of the pandemic will not play out this way, the figurative trash fire could strike at any moment.

I know from experience that derealization is a coping mechanism to deal with emotional overload. When something is too threatening or painful to face head on, derealization and avoidance temporarily insulates the psyche from the full ramifications of the tragedy. I will continue to keep track of the numbers, but I am also aware that the tragedy is unfolding faster than I can emotionally absorb it. After reading about the suffering of ICU nurses that are witnessing a flood of death, and the tens of millions of Americans that face an uncertain economic future and agonize daily about whether they'll be able to feed their kids this month, it is impossible to separate the numbers from the suffering that they cause. I recognize that I am emotionally affected by the suffering of others to the degree that it's affecting my own mental state while keeping track of this pandemic.

I also know that someday soon, I will look back on this time and come to terms with the anxiety and uncertainty and come out ok. I have the personal tools and knowledge to do this for myself as an individual. My hope now is that there will also be a collective, rather than individual, accounting of the pain caused by this pandemic and our collective failure to address it. We will need it in order for us to all heal.