[rob74]

No, they just treat human life as valuable and tend to err on the side of caution - reducing people to numbers is a slippery slope, because you can prove almost any point with statistics. Then you end up with [Star Trek-style dystopias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half_a_Life_(Star_Trek:_The_Ne...) like euthanising everyone at the age of 60 - after all, society as a whole is better off if you do that...

[mewpmewp2]

But when you are calculating active cases and death rates you are also reducing people to a number, it's just binary in this case, 1 = death, 0 = no deaths.