Lies, damned lies and statistics
There is a bit of a flutter on the news today.
They have decided that fewer people died from the Virus than was officially reported.
So fucking what?
What difference does it make? Or for that matter what is the importance of the number of deaths from any cause? The individuals whose deaths form the statistics are important to their friends and family but accumulating the figures means nothing.
There is an obsession with statistics. A tiny minority of those statistics are important such as discovering whether an area contains more pre-teens than teenagers [showing a need for more secondary school places] or whether there is a cluster of cancer cases which may be worth investigating, The vast majority however are just numbers which have no relevance to life at all. In a lot of cases they are even tortured to provide mythical figures [the number of lives saved by the smoking ban?].
I have just heard a report the the US has achieved a world record in today’s number of new Virus cases. Is there some kind of competition going on here? The Coronalympics? Should we send a few more Irish to the death camps so we can hold our head up and win a silver or gold?
The problem is that too many people these days have computers to play with.
Fucking spreadsheets!
"[the number of lies saved by the smoking ban?]."
That looks like a typo unless it’s just too subtle for my tired old brain.
Dammit! One of those that the smell-checker doesn't spot. And I proof read it three times. Fixed, thanks.
Maybe it was right to start with?
Freud is alive and well, and living in my head.
84.7% of statistics are made up on the spot.
My gob is frequently smacked when some dumb newsreader, with sepulchral voice tells us that deaths due to the pandemic are not decreasing.
The day that is not true is the day I will worry.
Covid-19? Bah! The thing about the test is it doesn't test for the virus that causes it. It's been around since the early '90s, it was rebuffed by scientific community plus there's no "gold standard"–whatever than means.
I liked the way an acquaintance put it:
Those that get it and get over it just had a bad cold. Those that died had underlying causes. You know, the ones may have died due to "Complications from covid-19".
So much for statistics.