The fraught, freighted number of this particular American moment is a round one brimming with zeroes: 100,000.

Facing such massive death and challenges counting the dead, Americans started to realize that numbers and statistics represented more than knowledge; they contained power, according to historian Drew Gilpin Faust.

Today’s Americans have precedents for visualizing and understanding 100,000 people — dead and alive.

At some point with numbers, though, things start feeling more abstract and less comprehensible.

“It’s really hard for people to grasp statistics when it comes to numbers after a certain scale,” says Lorenzo Servitje, an assistant professor of literature and medicine at Lehigh University?

“Can you picture 30,000 people Or 50,000 people.

“Each day we’ve become accustomed to the new reality that we don’t realize how far we’ve traveled from what normal is,” says Daryl Van Tongeren, an associate professor of psychology at Hope College in Michigan who studies how people find meaning in suffering.

Finally, there are numbers living within the round 100,000 number that cry out for their own interpretations.

The disproportionate number of dead Americans of color, for example.

Or the systematic way the disease is ravaging places where older Americans live, taking them in numbers that — if they were dying in mass shootings — might provoke a very different kind of reaction.

More likely, because of spotty testing and undiagnosed cases, the number 100,000 falls significantly short?

Have we decided to live with death, at least to a point.

What would it mean if, around Labor Day, we reconvened in this space to discuss the 200,000th dead American.

“And classifying things by number of digits can be a nice, clear way of classifying things.”.