Since I was a boy I had the aspiration to become a man of letters and my continuous 4 in mathematics confirmed it.
At the Classical High School mathematics is seen more or less like a work permit for foreigners in Kenya: you know it should be necessary but in the end you are convinced that you can do without it.
After a few decades, for the last nine months I have been suffering from the law of the counterbalance in life.
Every day I have to deal with the numbers of the Covid-19 bulletins in Kenya and I can't ignore them, even though they are quite useless, like mathematics in the Classics, except for statistics and comparisons with other equally superfluous numbers.
And it is like in the problems to be solved, for which you had to follow official procedures, those studied on the books with the right formulas, you cannot rely on the logic that would make you look beyond, in the field. The instinct (in this case of the job I do) that leads you to verify in person, to go deeper, to put reality and not a calculator at the centre of things, to understand the pandemic in Kenya and Africa.
And instead of official, there are only figures and those are reported by everyone.
Positive figures within 24 hours (24 hours of what? Since when? Here the results of the swabs arrive after two, three, four days...), totals that go up, active cases that never add up.
And you read them, reread them, study them and think about them.
If you could still do it, you would prefer to be postponed until September.
But here no one sends anyone back, except to that country.
And for me, who have chosen this country for a long time, all that remains is to study the useless.
Let's take for example the cases of Monday 23 November: we rise to 77,785 cases since Covid-19 arrived in Kenya. There are 51,903 cured. Deaths on the other hand, with the last 12, have risen to 1,382.
It follows that, according to these first two totals, if mathematics is not the opinion of a virologist, the cases still active should be exactly 24,500.
The official bulletin also tells us that 1,182 patients are still in hospital, while a further 7,142 are being treated at home or in isolation centres.
Now, I go back to the beginning of my piece: I am one of 4 in mathematics and, although algebra should be the easiest branch, something doesn't add up: where the hell are the other 16,176 infected?
This is of course only one example.
Even if they are always numbers, there could be some interesting data: to know the quantities of swabs analysed in the Counties, to understand if for example the 78 cases of Malindi refer to 79 swabs (in the hypothetical but science fiction case we would be very bad and I would gladly know the seventy-ninth case to see if we can learn something from the miracle workers).
Or if the tampons were 7800, which is even less likely, given that all over Kenya we are travelling at a very low rate, always between 5000 and 9000 tests per day and sometimes even less. We must therefore consider that the average of the areas we are most interested in is also more or less the same as the national one.
But even in this case we would have taken 4 in the exercise at school.
It's not a question of dusting off the commonplace of the "cold numbers", nor of making it an epochal discourse on how much algorithms, applications, retweets and various uozzappi have made us dumbfounded.
Numbers would be fine, if they told us reality and did not try to take truer, deeper and more meaningful words out of our mouths.