Aggregate Data

Macro-level entities like governments, economic and health agencies, and political pollsters often make use of “Aggregate Data” rather than individualized numbers to assess changes and make decisions.

So rather than census-takers considering detailed information about every single individual living within the region they’re tabulating as they’re ascertaining how folks are doing and trends are emerging, they instead sweep up gobs of information, average those numbers, and generate high-level figures that are more meaningful to various sorts of decision-makers.

Just as it’s not particularly useful (with rare exceptions) for a health agency to know that you, specifically, are sick, but it’s very useful for them to know that a lot of people across your hometown are sick (because that might allow them to deploy necessary resources to the area, or in extreme cases implement some kind of quarantine or other safety measures), then, so too is it generally assumed that big-picture summaries will be more practical than nitty-gritty details, at least at this level of operation and concern.

Government resources won’t tend to be mobilized because you are sick, but they might be deployed because there’s a pandemic sweeping through your region.