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A year and a half ago, we waited anxiously every day for the updated Covid-19 statistics from the state and gasped if the case count rose above 30.

Now, the daily number is hovering between 600 to 800 new cases on most days and it’s like, “Oh well. At least it’s not over 1,000.”

A strange numbness has crept in when it comes to numbers. It’s the kind of apathy or stupor born of frustration and helplessness. If you feel you can’t fix something, you learn to live with it broken. After a while, you figure out how to not let bad things bother you, and you go about your business. It’s a way to cope.

But the Covid numbers in our state should bother us.

As of the start of this week, the death toll in Hawaii from the coronavirus pandemic is 626 people.

That’s more than the entire senior class at Farrington High School.

That’s more than four full Hawaiian Airlines interisland flights.

That’s more than a third of the entire Honolulu Police Department.

Imagine the entire bottom floor of the Hawaii Theatre, both the orchestra seats and the parterre, with every seat taken and a few dozen people standing in the back. That many people have died.

And still we’re arguing about vaccines and social distancing and restrictions on gatherings like it’s all theoretical and not actual humans, our neighbors and friends and fellow citizens, dying.

Maybe we’d notice those 626 deaths en masse, but somehow, the singularity of each death, the isolated nature of an agonizing decline in a hospital ICU, the disconnect so many people have between the reality of the pandemic and the lies and conspiracy theories they’ve swallowed have blunted the impact of all those people, our people, our neighbors, who have died in this outbreak.

We should be all-in on prevention. We should be demanding “NOT ONE MORE!” We should be unified in “enough is enough.”

Tragically, we are not.

In contrast, there are the freak occurrences that snap everybody to attention.

Remember being afraid of rat lung worm on raw vegetables?  Yeah, nobody called that a hoax or a conspiracy. You know how many people in Hawaii died from rat lung worm? Two. Eighty-two people got sick, some of them very sick, some with lasting disabilities, but nobody got all huffy and insisted that washing your lettuce was an infringement of personal rights.

that caused liver failure in 72 people in Hawaii? Two people died. The Food and Drug Administration and the Hawaii Department of Health moved quickly to shut that down. Compare that to the use of a livestock de-wormer being ingested off-label to “treat” Covid.

“If people would only have the opportunity to walk around the ICU hallways and see what’s going on.” — Dr. Larry Antonucci of Florida

Messages from the state and the feds are worded as advisories and warnings, not bans. The other difference is that nobody insisted that they knew better than the FDA and vowed to keep taking the diet supplement because it’s their body and their choice on how to hurt it.

The Covid numbers have become as mundane as the . Nearly every time someone dies in a car crash, the local news media dutifully reports the tally of traffic fatalities that occurred in Hawaii so far that year and compares that number to the year prior. Does that make anyone drive more carefully? Rhetorical question. We all know the answer.

Here is another set of numbers that doesn’t seem to have impact:

There were 45 new COVID cases on Kauai on Monday. Remember when Kauai’s number was proudly holding at a steady 0? Kauai was a role model of how to protect a small town, but the compounded pressure of business interests and demands of personal freedom made all the safeguards fall away and, apparently, increased residents’ tolerance of knowing the virus was in the community.

Dr. Larry Antonucci, CEO of a hospital in Fort Myers, Florida, offered a great observation about this number-blindness over the weekend. Antonucci’s hospital has seen a dozen Covid patient deaths a day in that one facility and he expects that number to grow in coming weeks.  “If people would only have the opportunity to walk around the ICU hallways and see what’s going on and seeing the sickness and how young people are being struck down with this disease,” he said.

But all they see is numbers, not people.

That’s great big Florida. This is little Hawaii, where we still find two-degrees of separation between ourselves and total strangers (i.e. “You work with Larry? Larry is my cousin!”), where we have respect for our elders and treat other people’s kids like they’re our kuleana, too.

Or maybe Hawaii isn’t like that anymore. Maybe that’s a myth that this state has outgrown. Maybe we’re just like everywhere else, disconnected and disaffected, more interested in a fun fight or a bloody battle than notions of civic duty or world peace.

Let’s hope not. Covid has taken hundreds of Hawaii’s people and has left thousands more strangely, eerily, unconcerned.