One in a million
Spain has recorded more than one million coronavirus cases, becoming the first western European country to pass that landmark figure.
What makes one million a landmark figure
, other than for lazily dramatic, soundbite reporting that is? Surely, numerically it's a 1
with only zeros behind it, a lot of them, so there's a degree of binary simplicity to it. And if you group those zeros into threes, you have exactly two of them…1,000,000.
Other than that, the number of infections in any country is only a landmark
in relation to the size of the population. The other nations that have reported one million cases—US, India, Brazil, Russia, and Argentina—all have populations far greater than that of Luxembourg (pop. 620,000), for example.
China hasn't reached this landmark
, because the Chinese authorities lie through their teeth underreport the statistics have the pandemic under control. Just so that's clear.