Is Covid a Danse Macabre by the number 4?

What's in a number? You're asking the wrong person, people who know me would say. I never comprehended math; and math never made an effort to understand yours truly. Without being guilty of effusive, I would say we failed each other, though we lent ourselves a shoulder in times of crisis. For instance, I was able to sail through my studies that involved math without much damage to my repute of one from an educated family. My investment spiked over 600 per cent before plunging into negative territory and finding a place to moor in the swamp permanently. My hedging in self-confidence reaped rich harvest despite an artwork of band-aid plastered across my soul.
Yet, I celebrate numbers unabashedly. In the numbers I believe. They hold all the aces in the game of reportage. I am ashamed I have been blood-thirsty ever since I joined this industry. I'm a vulture in the garb of a newsman waiting to swoop down whenever a tragedy occurs. I'm a grave digger waiting for bodies to come in. The higher the number of bodies, the merrier. I must be one up in the war of numbers. I feel sad when my count of bodies is less than my rival's. Numbers is the oil that keep my engine vrooming despite the awareness I am only worth the last column I would file.
In the ungodly hours, I nefariously wait for the corona clock at the Worldometers site to strike three million infections. Will they or won't they? I have a deadline to meet, damn it. As I curse the nail-biting moments, I forget I have two doctors at home. Family never occurs to me when I am in the newsroom. "How dare you call me in the deadline hour?" I shout. In the newsroom, I am an incurable sadist. I love tragedies. I flirt with tragedies. My hero is a news-starved editor in an Indian newspaper who broke into an ecstatic dance when prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru died. What a guy!
As a journalist, I suffer from multiple personality disorder. The love for tragic numbers gives way to arithmophobia when I'm outside of the newsroom. After I put the edition to bed and drive home, I rewind the tragedies I had just dealt with. I curse my insatiable thirst for numbers. I break down in the solitude of my private space. When I'm overwhelmed, numbers creep up my body like a python and strangulate me until I cough up all the numbers I have hidden away in my cognitive field. It's No 4 that fell off my brain today. It hit the floor with the force and fury of a thousand dragons spitting fire across the world.
When I was looking to buy an apartment in Singapore, the first thing my no-nonsense real estate agent asked was, "Do you mind buying on the fourth floor?"
"Why?"
"Fourth-floor apartments come cheaper. It's a number game," he said, without explaining the mystery behind the so-called game.
In most buildings we checked out, there was no elevator landing on level four. We either went to the fifth and climbed down, or climbed up from the third, which ultimately put out my quest to go cheap. And it took a while for me to find out why the number 4 is not only unromantic but also damned liked 13.
Thirteen, especially Friday the 13th, is allegedly the most cursed day of the calendar and when everything is fated to go wrong. No 13 is invariably skipped in the sequence of hotel rooms and for any auspicious occasions in most part of the world. But why is the number 13 considered unlucky? Some of the reasons have their roots in religion and mythology, such as the belief that the 13th person to take seat at the Last Supper was either Judas or Jesus himself. But the funniest reason ever quoted for triskaidekaphobia, or fear of 13, is extreme sexiest. Some patriarchists consider 13 unlucky because women have around 13 menstrual cycles a year, based on a cycle length of 28 days.
If the number 13 is synonymous with misfortune, four is the mother of all bad lucks. For instance, add up the digits 1 and 3 in 13, what you get is 4, which is homophonous to the Chinese word si, which means death. Hence some would consider four as porte-malheur.
Tetraphobia, or the practice of avoiding the digit four, is a superstition prevalent in East Asian nations. The Japanese word shi and Korean word sa for the digit 4 sound similar or identical to death in their respective languages. That explains why the fourth-floor apartments are a bargain.
Covid-19 may have been titled so because the virus was first reported in the year 2019, but its fury was first felt in the year 2020. The world was okay to a large extend until February 2020 despite its lingering economic crisis, but the pandemic, which had its epicenter in the Chinese city of Wuhan, has devastated the world, killing over 200,000 and infecting more than three million.
The number 4 has been haunting the world for a while, eliminating great leaders of all time. Princess Diana died in a car crash on August 31 while India Gandhi and John F Kennedy were assassinated on October 31 and November 22, respectively. Martin Luther King Jr fell to an assassin's bullets on April 4 while Israel's Yitzhak Rabin was killed on November 4 and Sultan Ibraimov of Kyrgyzstan on December 4.
With my numerological encounters in life, I tend to strongly believe that the cursed number four is working over time to sow miseries across the globe. We are being pushed into a deep pit of agony by its mystical power. Take a deep breath and add up the digits in 2020, the year we're living through, the result is the same devilish digit. Four.
In this haunted year, we lost a galaxy of celebrities, including Joe Diffie, Terrence McNally, Allen Daviau, Ellis Marsalis Jr and John Prine, to the coronavirus pandemic. Bollywood suffered a double whammy when it lost Irrfan Khan and Rishi Kapoor, two of its most liked and talented actors, to cancer in a matter of two days. We watch helplessly as the Danse Macabre by the possessed numeric 4 continues.
The door bell rings.
"Dad, it's the breakfast delivery."
"Ask him how much."
"It's 31 dirhams."
"Oh no! Give him 35 and let him to keep the change." God save the delivery man!