While the epidemic is ravaging around the world we, the lucky ones not yet touched by it must live through the statistics of it. Until it touches someone close enough to you it's just all numbers.
There are all those first cases and deaths: in the world, in your continent, country, city. It's getting closer, numbers are getting bigger. All that matters are those smallest numbers. The ones closest to you.
The bigger those numbers get the more they lie. They also become meaningless, they lose individuality. It's easy to talk about few first victims, but who would remember patient 3682? In a global scale they would be just a statistic. But the too were first for somebody else.
Numbers are also uncertain the bigger they get. There will be errors in the data. When the numbers are small enough it's still noticeable and can reveal the fallacy of the tally. For example there were 28 deaths in total from COVID-19 in Finland yesterday. Today the number is one lower. Did that one person come back to life? Probably not, it was just an error. But would anyone have noticed such off by one error if there would have been hundreds of deaths per day?