I got this message today:
And I thought, “I’m skeptical already, given the title… but let’s take a look.”
In this case, the link was full of some interesting information. Visually, it presented the information in a digestible way. It was trying to re-frame this pandemic in a positive light: “Right now Coronavirus only kills 4 people for every million in America.”
And they make a good point! Right now the number of deaths per capita in the US is lower than other places in the world. Despite the fact that we have the most cases, there are more people in America. So, we do not have people dying as often.
But the death rate per capita is not a fixed number. That is because the death rate is related to how many positive cases there are. All of that is “per capita.” And, for the US, the number of cases is doubling every 2.5 days.
I don’t think that “the media” is “not telling” people the per capita information by choice. Most outlets are attempting to explain things in the best way they know how to convey the message that the data presents. And the data suggest, in general: This Coronavirus is a problem.
The one thing that some of journalists (across the nation, even at big new places like Fox News, CNN and NBC) are struggling with is that when data are moving along an exponential curve the “right now” numbers can be, at times, meaningless. So the journalist in the above post saying “right now” the United States is fine because it is worse in other places isn’t taking the exponential increase into account.
And that isn’t, totally, their fault. This stuff isn’t intuitive stuff. Because, intuitively, in three steps you should go from 1 to 2 then to 3. But along an exponential curve, from that point… you go to 27 then 81 then 243.
Let’s look at some recent data for an example…
The death rate of this virus in the United States thus far is 1.6-percent and let’s use a recent tally of 80,000 cases in this example. That means there have been 1280 deaths. Let’s assume the death rate never changes.
The number of cases is doubling every two and a half days. That means in five days from now there were will 320,000 cases and 5120 dead.
That puts the USA, on the scale used by the journalist in the above post, at 15 deaths per million. Maybe you say that still isn’t that bad.
What about another five days? 1.28 million cases. 20,480 dead. Now at 61 dead per million people.
So in ten days we went from being “the media isn’t telling you our death rate is low” to “Now our death rate is now third-highest in the world.”
Even after we practice social distancing, wash hands, etc. the incubation period and length of sickness cause delayed additions to the total cases and deaths. Plus the number of people who may die because there are no ventilators to keep them alive. There are a lot of variables.
Let’s just say we end up around 70 dead per million people. That may still sound not bad. It is half-as-bad as Italy. And it is just 70 people.
But then we have to multiply 70 time 332 (because that is how many million people live here according to the journalist who made the post). And that is 23,240 people. Dead.
I don’t think “the media” is hiding that. I mean, I’m apart of “the media” and I think I’ve been pretty transparent with all of my numbers and calculations. I’ve tried to put things into context when possible, explaining how things look from a scientific angle. Even the big places aren’t hiding that information. Or trying to make things sound worse than they really are. Because the possibility of 23,000 people dead in 10 days is pretty bad. Even if it takes 20 days, that is still bad.
Even if only 10,000 people die in 10 days. That is still bad.
So yes, “the media” isn’t telling you that the death rate at this moment is lower than other countries. But it isn’t because they are trying to make things sound worse than they are. It is because, mathematically and in this case, it isn’t as significant since we are at the base of an exponential curve.
On last thing: A big thanks to Carol for sharing this link, too. It gave me a good opportunity to highlight some things that we don’t often think about in our normal day-to-day life. I know there is a lot of information flying around about COVID-19, and sometimes it looks like it is good info, but it isn’t as meaningful as it looks. And being able to differentiate “good info” from “good-looking info” can be difficult.
Hopefully this post was helpful is highlighting one case where good-looking information wasn’t as helpful as good information.
