By Tanner Garrity Since the very start of the pandemic, we’ve tried to contextualize daily, monthly and yearly death tolls in terms of other pathogens and tragic events. We’ve compared the number of lives lost to to 9/11, to World War II, to the Spanish flu. It’s usually a bid for perspective, in an attempt to make those numbers mean something (or make someone feel something again, as living with loss becomes increasingly commonplace). But these links are tenuous at best. All deaths are situational. It’s rare that adding more numbers to the equation makes those initial numbers any more real. A…