In mathematics education, there is general agreement regarding the significance of mathematical literacy (also quantitative literacy or numeracy) for informed citizenship, which often requires evaluating the use of numbers in public policy discourse. We hold that such an evaluation must accommodate the necessarily fragile relation between the information that numbers are taken to carry and the policy decisions they are meant to support. In doing so, attention needs to be paid to differences in how that relation is formed. With this in mind, we investigated a public discourse that heavily relied on numbers in the context of introducing, maintaining, and easing the rules and regulations directed to contain the spread of the virus SARS-CoV-2 during the first epidemic wave of COVID-19 in Germany with its peak in early April 2020. We used a public-service broadcasting outlet as data. Our theoretical stance is affiliated with post-structuralist discourse theory. As an outcome, we identified four major related strategies of using numbers, which we named rationalisation, contrast, association and recharging. In our view explicit attention to these strategies as well as identifying new ones can aid the task of furthering critical mathematical literacy.

在数学教育中，人们普遍认为数学素养（也是定量素养或算术）对于知情公民的重要性，这通常需要评估公共政策话语中数字的使用。我们认为，这种评估必须适应数字所承载的信息与它们旨在支持的政策决定之间必然存在的脆弱关系。在此过程中，需要注意方式上的差异这种关系就形成了。考虑到这一点，我们调查了一个公共话语，该话语在引入、维护和放松旨在遏制病毒 SARS-CoV-2 在第一波 COVID- 流行浪潮中传播的规则和法规的背景下严重依赖数字。 19 在德国，2020 年 4 月上旬达到顶峰。我们使用公共服务广播网点作为数据。我们的理论立场与后结构主义话语理论有关。作为结果，我们确定了使用数字的四种主要相关策略，我们将其命名为合理化、对比、关联和充电. 在我们看来，对这些策略的明确关注以及识别新策略可以帮助提高批判性数学素养的任务。