The New Moral Math, or A Hundred Thousand Mirrors

One of the most disturbing social symptoms of America’s coronavirus epidemic is a malady we may call mathematical hysteria: the inability, and even unwillingness, of millions of ordinarily rational adults to look at the numbers dancing before their panic-stricken minds with any sort of context-related sobriety. And perhaps the ugliest manifestation of this mathematical hysteria is the moral argument that this outbreak warrants...