Blinded by a Blizzard of Data
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Via AIER
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics. While this warning is never terribly far from the political surface, it should be axiomatic whenever anyone starts talking about Covid data. It has been years since a common pool of data has been so thoroughly mishandled by all sides, and this is sure to continue at least until a vaccine has been developed and delivered.
The surest sign that someone is playing fast and loose with statistics in order to push a particular point of view is the absence of context. And regardless of one’s position on the need for Covid lockdowns, one thing is clear: since the outset, the media have quoted Covid statistics with a consistent absence of context. The result has been to turn people who believe Covid is a significant danger into quivering cowards, and to cause people who believe Covid isn’t all that dangerous to dismiss the warnings entirely.
All the way back in March, when we were just realizing what we were up against, the media defaulted to the case fatality rate – the number of deaths out of confirmed cases. The World Health Organization estimated this would be over 3 percent. Some outlets were reporting case fatality rates above 10 percent. By comparison, the case fatality rate for the common flu is a mere fraction of a percent.
On its face, a high case fatality rate leaves the uninformed reader thinking that the odds of dying from Covid are astronomical compared to the common flu. But in March very few people were being tested. To get tested for Covid, one generally had to be sick enough to be hospitalized. Those for whom symptoms were light or even nonexistent didn’t get tested.
The result is that the reported Covid fatality rate was biased upward – early estimates had Covid more than 100 times deadlier than the flu. But, at this point, the whole exercise was like asking what fraction of the female population is in labor by surveying women in a maternity ward. That statistics were frightening, but without the necessary context, they were also meaningless.
By early April, the media was feeding people daily reports on mounting Covid deaths. Gaudy numbers with lots of zeros framed every screen, and they drew the same significant attention that massive death tolls always bring. The missing context here: The number of people who died on a typical day before Covid.
At the April peak, more than 2,400 Americans were dying daily from Covid. But, before Covid, 7,800 Americans died daily. And that’s comparing the peak daily Covid deaths to average daily deaths in 2019. The average daily US Covid deaths since the outbreak occurred is around 870, or 10 percent of the number of deaths we would expect in the normal course of events. The number is concerning, but bodies were not piling up in the streets as many breathlessly predicted.
The lack of context led people to believe that thousands of deaths per day was something out of the ordinary. More people were dying to be sure, but to understand what that meant would have required people to understand how many Americans die each day in the normal course of events. The American people generally have little idea, and the media doesn’t help matters. It is the fantastic, after all, that drives media behavior.
By mid-April, pictures of exponential growth were everywhere. But exponential growth is typical. Every disease outbreak shows exponential growth at the outset. And every disease outbreak shows a peak and decline following that exponential growth. Without context, one could take the growth to mean that we’d all be infected, and likely dead, in short order.
By May, Covid deaths were falling, apparently depriving the media of a story. But increased testing meant that more cases were being discovered, so the media shifted from breathlessly reporting daily deaths to breathlessly reporting daily infections. For their purposes, one was as good as the other. . .
There is no question that Covid is a serious disease, and that every life lost is cause for concern. But each one of us faces very real risks every day from all manner of things. What’s important is that we address each risk with commensurate care. That the media has consistently reported on Covid without appropriate context suggests that historians will look back on 2020 less for its outbreak of Covid than for its outbreak of hysteria. Full Article By By Antony Davies & James R. Harrigan @ American Institute for Economic Research