There's an ad about reducing the road toll from a few years ago, before the pandemic hit, where a man is asked what he thinks would be an acceptable number of people to die on the state's roads each year.
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He guesses "maybe 70".
But then, 70 people - including his own wife and kids - are sent marching towards him. Faced with real lives, the man revises his answer to zero.
The ad is a powerful way to demonstrate that death tolls are not just numbers - but when it comes to COVID-19, that message is not getting through.
In 2022, according to a tally of deaths listed in state and local reports, about 320 people in the Illawarra died from COVID-19.
That number eclipses the deaths in all of 2021 and 2020, when 23 people died from COVID-19 in the almost two year period.
And yet, we probably care less now, collectively, than we did then.
In 2022, the region's annual COVID death toll was more than the entire state's road toll.
And the same number of local people who died in a year on the region's roads, died from COVID here in the last week of December.
But these days, it seems the notion of what's "acceptable" has changed, as case numbers and deaths due to the virus barely register.
For instance, can you imagine reading a headline proclaiming that there were "Eight new cases of COVID-19 in the Illawarra"? Two years ago it made front page news.
Last week, it was barely a blip - and actually positive news as case numbers are trending down again - when the weekly total was 100 times less, with 800 new cases in the Illawarra.
When you're comparing eight, 800, almost 6000 (the highest weekly total of cases for the region) or the local death toll of 320, numbers seem to lose all meaning
"You can't discount the value of a life"
Jane Carratt knows better than anyone that there are real people behind the figures.
The Shoalhaven nurse lost her dad Kevin Whalan to COVID-19 last June, when he was infected in an outbreak in Kiama's Bluehaven aged care facility.
Ms Carratt said she understands how people have become tired of hearing about the virus, but is also also frustrated by this lack of care.
"It's quite strange how the human psyche works," she said. "The way people relate to this seems to have been lost - it was once that there was eight cases here and everyone was worried, and now it's eight-hundred cases and it's like, 'meh'.
She is keen for people to know that her father - a former journalist, storyteller and lifelong volunteer - was not just a statistic, but a larger than life, valued community member who still had energy and passion before he got the virus.
"Dad led an amazing, very interesting life," she said, recounting when he was sent to Brazil to file a travel story and managed to track down English criminal Ronnie Biggs for an interview.
"He was a very community minded, he was very moral and ethical and that showed in his journalism.
"At the time of his death he had five adult children, nine adult grandchildren and six great grandchildren who he adored. He loved seeing the next generation and seeing them grow and see the world.
"He was always up for a chat, loved meeting new people and would be very much in the moment. If he saw an opportunity to meet or speak to people, he would take it."
Six months after his death, she said her family is still coming to terms with the way it happened.
"There's so many times I go 'I'll ask dad that, dad will know' and I realise he's not there," she said. The end wasn't nice, when you see someone struggling with breath - I wanted to ask, just how did this happen?"
This same impact is being felt by another 319 families across the Illawarra, but the reaction now from some readers of stories on weekly deaths or case numbers is "who cares" or "why are we still going on about this stuff".
Ms Carratt has urged people to keep caring and said her father would have wanted "to get the message out that COVID needs to be respected, as it has taken so many lives and continues to."
"I know Dad had lived a long life - he had his 93rd birthday in June - but then to be dead less than three weeks later... he was towards the end of his life, but the rug got pulled out very quick at the end," she said. "You can't discount the value of a life, and there's complacency that's crept into society now that 'oh it's just COVID'.
Why we are data weary
There's a fair bit of research showing that it's hard for people to conceptualise big numbers, and the rising apathy about COVID has been the subject of much debate among medical figures.
In may last year, as the COVID death toll in the US hit one million, Stanford University researchers explained that for most people, "visualizing what a million of anything looks like is an impossible task".
"The human brain just isn't built to comprehend such large numbers," neuroscientists Lindsay Hasek and Elisabeth Toomarian said.
"Numbers are a useful, clear and efficient way to summarize the harms of the pandemic, but the truth is that the brain simply can't understand what it means that a million people have died.
"By abstracting deaths into impossibly large numbers, people fall prey to the limitations of the mind. In doing so, it's easy to forget that every single numerical increase represents the entire lived experience of another human being."
Prominent health researcher Kathy Eagar has for months bemoaned the "apathy" around COVID deaths, uriging authorities to take more precautions against the spread of the disease,
In June, she pointed out that COVID-19 deaths in Australia were topping the 2021 national road toll in the space of about three weeks.
Newcastle University immunologist Associate Professor Nathan Bartlett described the rising death toll as "critical" and "unacceptable".
"People just want to move on, so largely, we seem to becoming a bit desensitised to the deaths," he said.
"But this number of deaths each week is really not acceptable over the long term."
This week, NSW Health reported 123 deaths and 10,758 cases. They said 69 deaths were in aged care facilities, and there were another 12 deaths in the Illawarra.
Kate McIlwain
For more than a decade, I've helped the Illawarra Mercury set the news agenda across the region. Currently I'm the paper's health reporter - covering the stories of Illawarra workers and residents in the wake of a global pandemic and at a time where our health systems are stretched to the limit.
For more than a decade, I've helped the Illawarra Mercury set the news agenda across the region. Currently I'm the paper's health reporter - covering the stories of Illawarra workers and residents in the wake of a global pandemic and at a time where our health systems are stretched to the limit.
