Josef Stalin is supposed to have said, “One death is a tragedy. A million deaths are a statistic.” You can decide where 97,000 — roughly the number of deaths from COVID-19 that have been recorded thus far — falls on that spectrum, but it seems clear that we have entered a zone in which the size of the daily body count exceeds the normal human capacity for empathy, at least as our culture has recently defined it.

I was struck by this, not for the first time, this morning listening to an NPR anchor interviewing a front-line nurse at a New York City hospital. As you might expect, the nurse, like the institution he works in, are currently overwhelmed, and part of the nurse’s job has been to try and keep families in touch with their loved ones undergoing intensive care, when they cannot be physically nearby because of the quarantine.

The NPR anchor, David Greene, pushed and pushed to get the nurse to single out an individual case, to tell their story in a way that would, as media people say, “put a face” on this phenomenon. The overall tone of the interview became increasingly somber, with Green interjecting dramatic pauses to emphasize the heroism, tragedy and drama of the scene.

I had to turn it off. My partner, too, who is nothing if not an empathic personality, got up and left the room. It wasn’t that we were so moved; rather that the interview seemed forced, almost trivial compared with the grim statistics coming at us from all sides. Yes, statistics. Numbers with multiple zeros, each one representing a human being, with or without family and friends, falling ill and suffering to various degrees from wretched to fatal.

I don’t know how NPR, or the media generally, or all of us as a culture, are going to come out of this experience – the first time since World War II, I think, that we have seen so much death so widespread, random and so close up. It’s notable that in the early post-war period, most of what was written or filmed for mass consumption did not emphasize the gruesome, close-up horror of the war – certainly not to the extent we see in work produced after the 60s or so. Nobody made a “Saving Private Ryan” or “Shindler’s List” in the 1940s, and not just because Steven Spielberg was still a toddler. War stories during the 40s and 50s were either about glorifying our side’s heroes (and vilifying the Germans and Japanese), or else poking lighthearted fun at a boneheaded military bureaucracy. And almost nothing was put out for mass-production about the Holocaust until the 1970s, even though the basic facts of the Nazi slaughter of Jews were well known. “Six million dead” was, for those of us growing up the 50s, mainly a statistic.

In this century, however, we are inundated nightly with stories that attempt to put a “face” on whatever horror is taking place anywhere, from Syria to Myanmar to Haiti to North Philadelphia. Advocates for victims constantly demand, usually successfully, that their stories be framed so as to evoke as empathic a response as possible. A few decades ago, this sort of thing was mostly confined to telethons like Jerry Lewis’ annual parade of super-cute disabled children, and late-night fundraising infomercials with close-up shots of malnourished African children that viewers were invited to save with their donations. Then the mainstream TV networks picked up the trick, and replaced the Olympian tones of Walter Cronkite with anchors who radiated sincerity and concern. No story could end without a tear, or a warm smile, and preferably both.

It works, I guess. At least it sells. Everything from cat food to kidney medicine to unregulated oil exploration is draped in empathetic human-interest stories these days, never mind the political ads showing aggrieved ordinary-folks whom Candidate X is fighting for. But there’s only so much empathy to go around, and what happens when the world’s pain and suffering becomes glaringly, inescapably ubiquitous?

Maybe we retreat to the statistics.

If so, one good source for that is a podcast from the BBC, called “More or Less.”  Created and narrated by a remarkably lucid and entertaining economist named Tim Harford, it takes a weekly look at current events through numbers. Today it featured a sober but still engaging discussion about deaths from Covid: Not the horror of each one, but the problems of measuring just how many there are from day to day.  Which turns out to be an important issue if you’re trying to understand whether countries such as the UK or US are doing the right things to battle, or at least mitigate, the pandemic. That was followed by a discussion of whether the virus is killing more men than women, and another about the debatable efficacy of wearing masks in public.

Held against NPR’s attempts to wring tears out of their audience, it can seem bloodless. But when you’re all wrung out and just want to know how, or if, we’re going to get through this disaster, some sober statistics can be a good thing.