At the very beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, I hounded my younger sister, a former public health planner/educator for New York City before founding her own consulting company, about numbers. For a word person, I’d become obsessed with them. Numbers are important, right? It’s how society quantifies things, like birthdays and anniversaries; wins and losses; and in times of crisis, it’s how we determine the true impact of it.

As a journalist, I want to make sure I understand a topic so I can write intelligently and let readers draw their own…