Set default value but retain value after that?

I've made some code that keeps track of how many users are alive in the game, however, it always resets the alive users to 0 whenever it loops through the code again, so if there's one person in the game and they die, instead of it saying "0 players alive", it will say "-1 players alive", since instead of starting at the number 1 (1 player), it starts at 0.

function GivePlayersValue()
local p = game.Players:GetPlayers()
for i = 1, #p do
local s = Instance.new("StringValue", p[i])
s.Name = "Playing"
end
end

local numberAlive = 0
local stringtoConcat = " PLAYER(S) ALIVE"


function GetAlivePlayers()
local count = 0  --this line is the problem, as it resets the count to 0. I just don't know any alternative
local p = game.Players:GetPlayers()
for i = 1, #p do
if p[i]:FindFirstChild("Playing") then
count = count + 1
else 
count = count - 1
end
end
return count
end

game.Players.PlayerAdded:connect(GivePlayersValue)
while true do
	wait(1)
	local combination = tonumber(GetAlivePlayers())
	for i,v in pairs(game.Players:GetChildren()) do
		v.PlayerGui.PAGui.Count.Text = combination .. stringtoConcat
	end

end