JOYEUX NOEM: Reporting (Covid) statistics is hard!

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 2, 2020

Let the Post's editors show you: As we've often noted, reporting statistics is very hard, especially for major top journalists.

That's even true with respect to major topic like pandemic infection and death. This very morning, the editorial board of the Washington Post helps us see how hard it can be to fight our way through such statistics.

In a newly published editorial, the board says that Sweden's experiment with "herd immunity" has majorly failed. As far as we know, that assessment seems to be accurate.

As far as we know, Sweden's experiment has been a major failure. But along the way, as they attempt to prove their case, the highly distinguished upper-end editors haplessly tell us this:

WASHINGTON POST EDITORIAL (12/2/20): Sweden is now caught in a wave of pandemic pain—and reversing course. Sweden has 48.9 new confirmed cases per 100,000 population, compared with 21.7 in Denmark, 8.2 in Norway and 7.7 in Finland. Sweden is averaging about 42.6 deaths per day, compared with 6.9 in Denmark, 3 in Norway and 2.1 in Finland. Sweden’s total 6,798 deaths, predominantly among the elderly, dwarf the toll in the other Nordic nations combined.

The editors went to the finest schools. But how much good did it do?

In this passage, the editors seem to be claiming that Sweden's current rates of Covid infection and death are much higher than the infection/death rates of three Nordic neighbors. 

As far as we know, that's true. But for starters, just consider the very first claim they made:

"Sweden has 48.9 new confirmed cases per 100,000 population, compared with 21.7 in Denmark, 8.2 in Norway and 7.7 in Finland."

In that statement, the editors have adjusted for population. For each of the countries, they're reporting the number of new cases per 100,000 population—but they fail to state the time span in question. 

Sweden is said to be recording 48.9 new cases per 100,000 population. But is Sweden recording that number of new cases on a daily basis? Is that perhaps a weekly average?

The reader has no way to know. In a typical manifestation, the editors fail to say.

Now, consider the editors' second statement:

"Sweden is averaging about 42.6 deaths per day, compared with 6.9 in Denmark, 3 in Norway and 2.1 in Finland."

In this case, the editors have defined the relevant time span; Sweden is averaging roughly 42 deaths per day.  But is that Sweden's average number of deaths per day unadjusted for population? Or is that Sweden's average number of daily death per 100,000 population? 

The editors failed to say—and by now, we were puzzled. Here's why:

A forgiving person might want to assume that both sets of statistics represent these nations' average daily occurrences per 100,000 population. 

A forgiving person might want to make that assumption. But is it possible that Sweden is averaging 49 new cases per day, but as many as 42 deaths? 

On its face, that didn't seem to make sense. For that reason, we decided to click the one link the editors provide. We were taken to this borderline bewildering web site maintained by the Financial Times.

Even at that major Covid web site, the FT does a strikingly poor job explaining what its various charts and graphs are recording. Such confusions have been remarkably common as elite journalistic cadres have attempted to keep us abreast of the most significant Covid-19 statistics.

Making a long story short, we journeyed to some other sites which are easier to interpret. And sure enough:

According to this useful site, Sweden is currently averaging roughly 42 Covid deaths per day; Denmark is averaging 7. But those are average numbers of daily deaths nationwide, unadjusted for population.

That said, Sweden's population is almost twice the size of each of the other three Nordic nations. And as we've noted a million times, it doesn't make sense to draw comparisons of this type between countries without adjusting for population. 

As a general matter, it doesn't make sense to do that. But our major journalists, from Rachel on down, routinely do this. (Needless to say, it's generally done when it makes a preferred storyline better.)

Again, we're not suggesting that the board's overall assessment about Sweden is wrong. As best we can tell, Sweden's attempt to ride the herd immunity hobby horse is an experiment which has failed.

We're speaking here about something different. Consider our point this way:

Fred Hiatt, the Post's editorial board editor, is a Harvard graduate (class of 1974). And not only that! His father, Howard Hiatt, was a medical researcher and dean of the Harvard School of Public Health!

Even with a background like that, Hiatt couldn't induce the board to offer a coherent presentation about the way these Nordic nations currently fare in this major public health crisis. Hiatt is a thoroughly sensible person, but in an intellectually capable world, that passage in this morning's Post would be viewed as a comically puzzling mess.

It wouldn't be hard to rewrite that passage so that it made perfect sense. You'd have to make some basic adjustments:

It made no sense to present any figures in that passage without adjusting for population. Most strikingly, it made no sense to adjust the figures for Covid cases but not for Covid deaths.

For various reasons, it would have made better sense to present the daily numbers of cases and deaths per million population. But all in all, that passage from the board is an incompetent mess.

That said, can we talk? This sort of thing is amazingly common when Covid data are reported by the upper-end press. This brings us back to the conceptual mess Governor Kristi Noem loosed on the world back on November 18.

Noem is governor of South Dakota. Her father was a farmer/rancher. He wasn't dean of anybody's school of public health. 

With that in mind, to what extent might Noem have thought that her presentation made sense? We can't hope to answer that question, but just to refresh you, her hopelessly jumbled, grossly misleading presentation went exactly like this:

NOEM (11/18/20): Across the country and around the globe, cases [of Covid-19] are increasing. Over the past week, cases are on the rise in 48 states.

Some have said that my refusal to mandate masks is a reason why our cases are rising here in the state of South Dakota, and that is not true.

Others have said that my refusal to advance harsh restrictions like lockdowns is another one of the reasons why our cases are rising, and that is also not true.

There are 41 states that have some kind of a mask mandate. Cases are on the rise in 39 of those 41 states.

Now, some in the media have said that South Dakota is the worst in the world right now, and that is absolutely false. I'd encourage you to look at the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. There you'll see that there are other states with far higher new confirmed cases per one hundred—one thousand people, compared to South Dakota.

That presentation was a mess. How did the press corps react?

Tomorrow: What in the world had she said?

For figure filberts only: For the record, the FT site records these current daily death rates for the four Nordic nations. These are average numbers of Covid deaths per day per 100,000 population:

Sweden: 0.41
Denmark: 0.12
Norway: 0.06
Finland: 0.06

Even after adjusting for population, Sweden is doing substantially worse. But dag, those numbers look small!


13 comments:

  1. 1. Somerby chides the Washington Post (for an editorial, not news reporting) but the mixed up figures come from the Financial Times. Shouldn't they get some of the blame?

    2. The purpose of the sentence was to show that Sweden was doing worse than its Scandinavian neighbors. Does it matter what the figures are measuring, as long as they measure the same thing for each country? If they did adjust for population and those figures are still larger for Sweden, the figures have served the author's purpose.

    3. Being precise about such things, as Somerby demands, usually requires more space, more words. That works against the journalistic demand that reports be as short as possible. It may be the author knows how to define his figures properly but doesn't want to use up the space (extra words) required to do so.

    4. Figures tend to bore readers. There is a limit to how many and how precisely they can be provided while still keeping reader attention. This too works against the journalistic demand to be interesting and keep readers engaged. Only wonks respond to numbers, so the fewer of them the better, while still managing to support a claim with evidence.

    Somerby, of course, appreciates none of this. His only purpose in pointing out these shortcomings is to enhance his own ego. He doesn't understand that no one really gives a damn how many daily average deaths occur in Sweden, only the larger point that unrestricted social inter-mingling has not produced herd immunity and is working out badly for Swedish people, so we perhaps ought not to try that here.

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  2. "Fred Hiatt, the Post's editorial board editor, is a Harvard graduate (class of 1974). And not only that! His father, Howard Hiatt, was a medical researcher and dean of the Harvard School of Public Health!"

    If only statistical knowledge were inherited! Who cares what his father did or knew? Such knowledge is not passed down to kids.

    ReplyDelete
  3. "Even after adjusting for population, Sweden is doing substantially worse. But dag, those numbers look small!"

    Here Somerby refers to numbers like .06 and .42.

    In a statistics class, students are taught the difference between continuous and discrete measurement. Height, for example, comes in feet and inches and can be measured in fractions of an inch. People come in whole numbers. You do not have a half person or a fraction of a person. You round off to the nearest whole person because there is no such thing as a partial person.

    So, there is something meaningless about those figure of .06 when the unit is people or deaths (since death happens only once to each person, there is no such thing as a half death). Conceptually, you are not talking about people or deaths or cases at all when you use these proportions, but referring to the population and measuring some property of that larger population.

    But readers think in terms of people, not millions or thousands in a country, but individuals. That's why these very small numbers (.06) make no sense and have no impact when talking about covid illness and death. It isn't a unit of measure that anyone can relate to.

    Somerby might recognize that journalists understand this and are writing for an audience that is not public health officials or epidemiologists, but every day people, who are wondering if they are going to catch this thing, or mourning the passing of loved ones who have died. Somerby thinks a newspaper should be written for the random statistician (or actuary such as David in Cal), and not for the millions of other people who have very different concerns.

    This is yet another example of Somerby's lack of empathy and inability to imagine what people care about, how they think, and what they might want to know from a paper such as the Washington Post.

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  5. Somerby is creating confusion where there is none. The Post editorial is not unclear. It clearly states that they are reporting the number of cases per 100,000 and the average total number of deaths, not per 100K.

    In both cases, the Financial Times gives the rolling seven-day averages. The two options for viewing the numbers are “per 100K” and “raw numbers.”

    And, as Somerby has stated in the past, since Sweden has twice the population of any of the other Nordic countries, it’s pretty clear that Sweden’s average number of deaths is far more than twice that of the other countries.

    As for those per 100K numbers looking “small”, that is either an unamusing or ignorant comment.

    Yesterday, the US number of deaths per 100K was about 0.78. Dang, that looks small. And how do you adjust that to a per million figure? It involves some complicated mathematical calculations:
    1. multiply the per 100K figure by 10.
    2. That’s it.

    Whew! Hard.

    So, the US rate per million was about 7.8. In real human deaths, that adds up to 2,607.

    Now, 0.78 sure sounds small! But, then, so does 7.8 arguably. Perhaps in some minds 2,607 also sounds small.

    Somerby’s post just seems clownish.

    ReplyDelete
  6. One nordic country is doing way worse than the others.
    Swedish policy was ten times more lethal than their neighbors.

    US policy was more than twice as deadly as Canadian policy.

    (Figures from https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/))

    Deaths per 1M population

    USA 841
    Canada 325

    Sweden 713
    Denmark 152
    Iceland 79
    Finland 74
    Norway 65

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