Categories
BW Member Blog

Lies, damned lies, and statistics

The two famous quotes on statistics, the one titling this piece and its sibling “figures don’t lie but liars know how to figure.” could hardly have a better illustration than the CCP virus pandemic we find ourselves dealing with. There is a confusion of figures and percentages flying around like budgerigars on speed. We should have some sympathy for honest journalists trying hard to make sense of a bewildering and constantly changing situation, with all sorts of numbers coming from different countries, often untrustworthy, with different definitions. Each country has taken different actions to deal with the situation and comparing like with like is next to impossible. However, we should not have sympathy with those malign journos that deliberately conflate total numbers and per capita figures to make things look as bad as possible.

This seems to be happening in the US quite a bit. In particular, the simple fact that the US now has the highest total number of deaths attributed to the virus is used to attack Trump’s leadership. A similar thing is being done with Sweden, today I saw an article comparing Sweden’s rate death rate of people diagnosed with the CCP virus compared with her neighbours Finland and Norway. The writer blamed Sweden’s very courageous decision to have the lightest touch possible with regards to social distancing. This is typical, the usual suspects are using this crisis, and the myriad of statistics that come out of it, to do two things. Firstly, in the US and the UK they are using it as a big stick to beat President Trump and Boris Johnson’s Conservative government. Secondly, they are using them to bolster calls for ever more extreme and repressive measures to enforce the communal house arrest we call social distancing.

I’ve been thinking about this, what can we look at to give us a good, reliable idea of where we are, and what is working. I decided to look at the deaths per million of population. It us clearly a nonsense to merely state that the US has lost more people than Italy, or that Sweden has had far fewer, each country has very different populations. What I’ve done is simply calculate the number of officially declared deaths per million of current population for seven countries. The US, the UK, Sweden, Spain, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands. I’ve not bothered with the People’s Republic of China as it’s is clear we cannot really trust anything coming out of Beijing. Likewise, Germany seems to be using different criteria to most other countries. So, let’s see what we get.

So, remember, this table shows the number of Covid-19/CCP virus deaths per million of the country’s population, as of 19th April 2020. Interestingly, the three countries at the top have all enacted tough and wide ranging lockdowns. For example, the Spanish have fined over 100,000 people. In Italy many people are becoming far more desperate about lack of money than about the virus. Here in te UK the lockdown is pretty thorough, and we’ve had some egregious examples of overeach but generally it’s not too bad. Sweden has made a point of being relaxed, so far this seems to be working. The  reaction in the USA varies locally and, again, seems to be working. Very interstingly, Belgium and the Netherlands are widely different, despite being neighbours with similar demographics. Belgium has gone full lockdown while the Dutch have been quietly following a more relaxed line.

I know that many would say that Sweden and the US are X weeks ‘behind’ Italy etc. I really don’t see this. America has a huge number of business and social links with China. Given modern travel and connections I can’t believe that the virus actually landed in the US any later than it did in Italy or Belgium.

It’s difficult to make cast iron statements in such a fluid situation. Maybe the Swedish death rate is about to go up. We can’t re-run the scenario with a different set up, all we can do is look at what we see. To me, it seems clear that enforcing strict lockdown does not guarantee a better outcome in terms of infection and death. It does, however, guarantee ecconomic hardship, social problems, damage to the relationship between police and people and a potentially long term loss of freedom.

3 replies on “Lies, damned lies, and statistics”

Nice work and thank you. Helps to clarify my thoughts about how the numbers are being use/misused as they are presented to us by different media.

You’re right, of course. For what it’s worth, President Trump’s team has been reporting (with charts) deaths per million at the daily briefings. So the media actually has to work to twist the numbers to their liking.

Leave a Reply