LIES, DAMNED LIES AND THE DEATH TOLL
Let’s talk about statistics. I don’t like them. Back in the day, a friend of mine was in a class called “Economic Statistics” (Econ Stix,) and one day he closed the book, stood up, left the class, dropped out of college, and never went back. I get that! But in these days of pandemic, basic numeracy is a civic duty. And for things more complicated than just counting stuff we need statisticians, mathematicians, epidemiologists and other trained professionals, whom I will now label “eggheads.” We need them for questions like, how many people have died from Covid-19 in the USA? And how many are projected to die given certain conditions – lockdown vs. opening?
Right away this generates all kinds of sub-questions…
- Have people been dying at home, without being tested?
- What about nursing homes where reporting was sporadic; has that been corrected?
- But maybe fewer people are dying from car crashes and work-related accidents in lockdown?
- What about people who are afraid to go to the hospital/can’t afford treatment and then die of heart attacks, etc. Do those deaths count?
Who can figure it all out? I’ll tell you who: eggheads. They’ve got methods and models and math; and formulae and distribution spreads and standard deviations and regression to the mean — all the good stuff. God bless them, and may their abacuses never grow rusty.
The trouble is, eggheads don’t do certainty unless they really are totally certain. I got all excited when I found this piece by Peter Tippett, an Internal Medicine-certified, Emergency Room MD with a PhD in Biochemistry and thought he had proved with statistics that, if you wear a mask and do distancing, you’re … pretty safe! Then my physicist son pointed out that Tippett is not proving that I have only a 1% chance of infection, he’s saying that stacking or layering certain protective devices and behaviors dramatically improves your chances. And thus my balloon of certainty deflated. Eggheads, they do that – I think because of something called “effect size” or “error spread,” I don’t even know. They have their ways.
But! Tippett’s reasoning is sound, so the next time I park outside the grocery store, instead of quoting Dirty Harry at myself — “You’ve got to ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do you, punk?”…
… I am going to play Mary Chapin Carpenter instead, because I DO ALL THE PROTECTIVE THINGS and, like she says, “The stars might lie but the numbers never do.”
And here’s an excellent short piece (with numbers!) by Professor Erin Bromage, Comparative Immunologist at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth explaining why opening schools and restaurants too soon is a great way to catch the plague. His advice is good, unlike that from Fox News people who are urging you to go to the mall, while their offices are closed and they work from home.
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