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Anniversaries

Head Rambles Posted on by

Today is an anniversary day.

This day last year our beloved HSE launched their Covid website where they publish their daily figures.

The site, and its sister site is a statistician’s wet dream, full of numbers and statistics. There are daily figures and weekly figures. Rates per 100,000 and percentages of county populations. Rankings of county performance and breakdowns of age and gender. The list is almost endless. There are even interactive charts and maps. Individual family tragedies are drowned in a sea of figures.

I confess I have been following the site over the year. I’m not some kind of health fanatic who is going to panic at a few statistics, but I am interested with numbers in general. I take a detached view as numbers in my area rise or fall and have been following Wicklow’s progress in the league just for the craic. For a long time we were number one at the bottom of the league but a couple of weeks ago we slipped to eighth place but have since climbed to third spot.

One little figure that barely gets a mention is the median age of deaths. For the duration of the third wave that figure has hovered around the 81 to 86 mark, so half the deaths are in people whose ages range from 80 [or so] up to 104 which I think was the highest I noticed. The pensions people must be delighted at this little cull?

They reckon our current “total lockdown” is now going to last until April at the earliest and possibly even May. It’s hardly killing off the pandemic after eight weeks, so what is a further six weeks going to accomplish? Other than further misery and completing the annihilation of small businesses and bankrupting the country of course.

Today is another anniversary too.

But I’d prefer to forget about that one.

It just makes me feel old.

1000111 if you must know..

 

Comments

Anniversaries — 13 Comments

  1. Happy Birthday!

     

    I'll be a mere 1000110 in a week or two (so am still in the better 'cohort' yet)

     

    There are 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who do not.

    • Thank you sir, and many happy returns in a week or two.

      There are 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who do not. laughlaugh

  2. Someone I know who works at Leinster House observed that the median age of Covid deaths was 83 whereas the average life expectancy in Ireland was 83. "Catch Covid," he commented, "and live an extra year."

    The end of the world Christians in the 1970s used to say the mark of the beast would be in binary – 1010011010. I suspect they were people who had not liked their maths teachers!

    • Why on earth [or heaven or hell] would the mark of the beast be in binary?  I always thought it was just a mark that could equally be "bbb", or did they insist it was numerical?

  4. I'm pretty much ignoring anything about Covid-19 these days. In fact, I'm downright disgusted with the way people are acting overall. A good local example is the UPS store we have on Main Street here in Newport that just got their contract yanked by UPS due to the owners finally getting sick and tired of wearing masks and decided not to anymore. So, now we have yet another closed business on Main Street to go along with an entire block that was torn down and is now a big cavity in the ground.

    Oh and a very happy birthday to you sir! On an up note, you're only 47 in hexadecimal so take heart.

  6. It is often said that there are two types of statistics, those you look up and those you make up.

    I'm not convinced that all the governmental Covid stats sit happily in the first category, but creating a fog of apparent data is a sure-fire way to make sure folk don't spot the difference.

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