THE DENOMINATOR: SOME PEOPLE ARE COUNTED. MOST ARE NOT.

In 2011, Dr. Akshaya Bhagavathula leaves a rain-soaked house in Hyderabad and a mother who does not want him to go, carrying one stubborn belief into the field: if he counts the dead honestly, the world will act. He is not a soldier or a natural hero. He is a quiet, precise man who thinks a number is a form of respect for the dead. Over the next eleven years, that belief will be tested in the worst places on earth, and it will cost him almost everything.
As a frontline epidemiologist for the...