Trying to Understand 1,250,000 Deaths

According to the WHO’s Global Tuberculosis Report 2024, an estimated 1.25 million people died from tuberculosis in 2023. In Indonesia, where I’m from, approximately 1,090,000 people fell ill and 125,000 died from TB.

I read these numbers and they stayed abstract. I understood they represented a serious problem, but I couldn’t connect them to actual suffering, to real lives. How do you make sense of 1,250,000 deaths? What does 125,000 deaths in Indonesia actually mean?

There was a gap between reading statistics and understanding what they meant. I needed something that could help me see beyond the numbers. So I decided to read John Green’s Everything Is Tuberculosis, and I recommend it to anyone trying to understand this crisis.

The book discusses many things. It discusses the history of the disease, how it’s prevented, how it’s cured. But what affected me most was learning about Henry Reider, a young tuberculosis patient the author met in Sierra Leone in 2019.

Henry was 17 when they met, though he looked about 9 years old. He was small because he’d grown up malnourished. He had been sick with tuberculosis since he was 5, and the disease had waxed and waned in his body for most of his youth. When Green met him, Henry had drug-resistant TB, his infection wasn’t responding well enough to the drugs, and the doctors knew it would come back stronger.

Through the book, you learn about Henry’s struggles. His mother, Isatu, had to move to the city to be near the hospital, struggling to provide food for them both. The treatment was grueling, consisting of months of medication with brutal side effects that Henry had to fight through while also fighting the hunger. Many of his friends and family stopped interacting with him because of the stigma. At one point, his father wanted to take him out of the hospital because Henry wasn’t getting better, and if he was going to die, it would be better for him to die close to family rather than in a hospital far from home.

These are the kinds of struggles you don’t see when you look at “1,250,000 people died from tuberculosis.” You don’t see the daily exhaustion. The family’s worry. The impossible choice between staying near the hospital or being close to home. The hunger. The side effects. The fear of dying. The stigma that isolates you from your community. The financial pressure. The feeling of being distant from everything familiar while fighting for your life.

But those struggles happen. They happened to Henry. And they happen to every single person in those statistics.

Think about Henry: everything he’s overcome, everything he’s survived, how hard his life has been. Then try to multiply that by 1,250,000 deaths globally every year. Or 125,000 for Indonesia alone. That’s what those numbers represent. Each one is a Henry.

What I learned from reading this book is that to understand numbers, you need to understand individual stories first. Statistics tell you the scale, but stories tell you what that scale actually means. When you know one person’s struggle, the numbers start to carry real weight. You can’t hold 1,250,000 people in your mind at once, but starting with one person’s story might changes how you see all the rest.