The Covid Screwtape Letters — Part 11: The Gospel of the Inflated Death

Part 1 (origins), Part 2 (masks), Part 3 (lockdowns), Part 4 (the new normal), Part 5 (plexiglass), Part 6 (quarantines), Part 7 (social distancing), Part 8 (swabs), Part 9 (essential workers), Part 10 (hypocrisy)

My Dear Dr. F,

It is one thing to unleash a contagion; it is quite another to convince a civilization that they are all going to die of it. That, my dear boy, is where you have ascended from mere mischief to art.

You have perfected the discipline I call numerical necromancy—the conjuring of catastrophe from the faintest statistical whisper. I have witnessed many forms of fear-craft in my centuries, but never such efficiency. You took a virus that imperils the old and infirm, and by simple transmutation of arithmetic, rendered it the universal specter of mankind. Bravo!

How simple it was: take the case-fatality rate—that tawdry fraction of deaths among the tested—and proclaim it as the infection-fatality rate—deaths among all infected. No one noticed the sleight of hand! The trick works best when testing itself is corrupt—oversensitive swabs detecting the ghosts of infections long past. The more you tested, the more harmless “cases” you found, and the more you could feign discovery of a spreading doom.

You have resurrected the medieval art of indulgence-selling. Once, a priest might promise salvation for a coin; now, a bureaucrat sells it for a statistic. A mortality rate of 3.4 percent, declared from the pulpit of the World Health Church, caused whole nations to rend their garments. By the time saner minds like that meddling Stanfordian Ioannidis whispered that the true figure was nearer to the common flu, the flock had already cast itself into the sea.

I commend the moral dimension of your arithmetic. You gave numbers the tone of judgment. A one-in-a-thousand risk became a divine referendum on compassion. “Would you kill Grandma for a haircut?” they cried. Fear became virtue; prudence, heresy.

The beauty of exaggeration is that it requires no maintenance—merely repetition. Once the multitude believes that safety is arithmetically impossible, they will gladly mortgage eternity for one more day of supervised living. Keep them counting, dear nephew. Keep them refreshing dashboards like prayer wheels.

Yours in logarithmic damnation,
Screwtape

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My Dearest Uncle Screwtape,

You flatter me! Yet truly, the numbers performed the miracles themselves. I merely gave them a pulpit.

You should have seen their eyes, Uncle, when I spoke the sacred syllables—“three point four percent.” It sounded so precise, so scientific, so grave. None thought to ask, “Three point four of what?” They swooned at the decimal point as though it were a sword of judgment.

When doubts arose, I invoked “the models.” Oh, what a treasure the models are! For they are never wrong—only revised. A forecast of millions of deaths can be celebrated as salvation when only hundreds of thousands perish. “See?” I tell them. “Our sacrifices worked!” Thus, every failure becomes proof of success.

I have also divided the generations splendidly. The young are told they may be asymptomatic murderers; the old are told everyone younger than seventy is a walking bomb. None recall that the median age of death equals the median age of life itself. They see death everywhere, even in survival.

Your term “numerical necromancy” is apt. Each morning I raise the dead again through creative counting. “Died with” becomes “died from.” “Probable” becomes “confirmed.” “Unknown” becomes “Covid-related.” The obituaries multiply like loaves and fishes, and the media apostles cry, “Record numbers!”

Still, a few skeptics quote Ioannidis and his heretical suggestion that we have mistaken a house cat for a tiger. How shall I quiet them? More charts, perhaps, or a new metric entirely? “Long Covid deaths,” maybe—death postponed indefinitely, the fear eternal?

Yours in statistical salvation,
Dr. F

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My Dear Dr. F,

You learn quickly. Yes—invent new numbers. Deaths are finite, but fear can be infinite if one measures cleverly. Introduce sub-categories: “excess deaths,” “deaths delayed,” “deaths averted by compliance.” Confuse them until the distinction between arithmetic and theology collapses.

And remember: the smaller the risk, the louder the sermon. A one-percent peril inspires debate; a one-tenth-of-a-percent peril inspires crusade. Humanity cannot resist a microscopic menace—it flatters their egos to believe they can perceive and manage the invisible.

When historians finally unearth the truth, their own mortality will silence them. For every Ioannidis who cries “fiasco,” a thousand priests of panic will chant “precaution.” You need only outlast the news cycle; the memory of sanity fades faster than the virus itself.

Press on, dear nephew. Let the living count the dead until they forget how to live.

Your affectionate uncle,
Screwtape