Some Things Are Not What They Seem: The COVID Metric Reporting is Worse Than the Virus

There is a lot of confusion these days whenever you encounter the use of COVID metrics in mainstream media reports. I am reminded of my days in college when a Statistics professor said that in order to get published in a peer-reviewed journal, the idea was to come up with a conclusion and find data that supports that conclusion. I remember when I heard that, even at my developmental stage of learning, something did not sit right with me. It seemed to me some sort of deception simply for personal gain. It was later in life that I fully understood the implication of what my professor said at that time: if the majority of professors and professionals engage in that sort of activity, then the amount of garbage being produced would increase over time. The lines between true and false would be blurred; and if you have a thought that borders absurdity, then you simply make up the data (legally of course) to prove the absurdity. 

This is what why it is helpful to read and understand the simple concepts in the book, How to Lie with Statistics. I've written a few posts summarizing that book; one is here. Simply click on the label with the name of the book.  

Here in this post I will simply highlight some of this absurdity. Back on March 18, 2021, the Financial Times published an article titled, “The US vaccine effect: rapid rollout starts to bear fruit,” where they showed various metrics that illustrated the success of vaccines in reducing the number of death and cases allegedly due to COVID. In the article they produced the following graph:

The pre- (right graph) and post- (left graph) trend is obvious. Down. Actually, the left side is more down than the right. The point the FT is trying to prove is that vaccines are working as intended. But poking a bit deeper into the metrics they report, you will notice some things don’t quite add up. For example, “cases and deaths as a percentage of peak during each wave”, what exactly are those peaks? Nowhere in the article have they told you that. That alone invalidates the analysis; or at a minimum raises the question of how exactly they arrived at the numbers to come up with the graph. If you are left to guess how a metric was derived, then it is likely you are being conned (irrespective of motive by the writer, here the FT). The assumption attributed by the FT to these graphs is that the vaccines are the reason why cases and deaths have declined.

 Now, as a counter example, take a look at the broader COVID case data reported by the CDC. The graph as of April 1, 2021 is here:

Unfortunately the graph is not as clear when copying here, so you can go to the CDC and look at the data there. When you focus on the time period since the FT article was written (mid-March 2021 to the present). What do you see? Yes, the trend is up, albeit slightly. So, if the FT logic is sound, we must then conclude that vaccines are not bearing fruit. Indeed, the FT metric and the ones I am showing you are not identical. But the point I am making is that if you have a particular conclusion, you can find data to fit that conclusion.