The Washington Post prepared a “summary” of the Coronavirus pandemic data. “Mapping worldwide spread of the coronavirus. August 1, 2020. It’s an insult to any intelligent reader. I recall that Sir Francis Bacon once wrote that “reading maketh a full man, conference maketh a ready man and writing maketh an exact man” Apparently the writers for the Post have simply not been writing enough to become exact men and women.
In a review of the covid 19 data they seem to start with an idea of what the results should look like and then proceed to manipulate the information to get to that point. Sir Francis Bacon would call that circular reasoning. In effect turning logic and science on its head. If you would like to be fooled and mentally manipulated read: Washington Post “Mapping worldwide spread of the coronavirus. August 1, 2020. See how they try to compare apples and oranges and give a totally misrepresentative picture of the pandemic.
Below I report on a similar piece published in Le Monde the French daily. The French are not so badly infected with Trump manic derangement syndrome. Furthermore they do not have an election at hand so they are less likely to politicize all manner of reporting —as in the Post case even simple analysis of existing mathematical data.
The report I recommend appeared in LeMonde (July 31, 2020): “The Current Corona Virus Crisis Will Affect Us for Decades. According to a graph published and included in the Le Monde piece concerns the world covid 19 pandemic. It reveals that the disease peaked around the beginning of April with about 10,000 deaths reported worldwide and and then slowly declined to about 4000 or 5000 deaths by June. Subsequently, the world rate has begun to rise again in a second wave. At the date of this publication it was almost 6000 deaths worldwide. The last data points have shown a turn downward so it seems as though perhaps the second wave is now declining but slowly.
The LeMonde editors were apparently aware that you simply can not compare confirmed cases and death rates in nations around the world attempting to compare nations with hugely different population sizes. Results from such an exercise are meaningless. How can one compare the total deaths to covid 19 in Greece (pop 10 million) with the USA (320 million). The population size variable must be eliminated for a valid comparison.
Thus logically— like the French— they published a list of the ten front line nations and included data based on confirmed cases and deaths —per million population. The numbers of cases is of course controlled by just how many tests a nation has completed. However mortality —related to the disease—per million population I can be a better measure of just how the disease is progressing in each of the nations. According to a list compiled by the French newspaper the numbers of deaths per million list follows.
Top Ten Nations Reporting Deaths From Covid 19
Nation Deaths/Million Mortality Rate*
1-Belgium. 860 per million. 14%
2-UK 700 per million 15%
3-Spain 600 per million 10%
4-Peru 600 per million 5%
5-Italy 580 per million 14%
6-Sweden 560 per million 7%
7-Chile 500 per million 3%
8-US 460 per million 3%
9-France 450 per million 13%
10 Brazil 440 per million 4%
*Deaths per confirmed cases
According to Le Monde data there were @700,000 confirmed deaths world wide out of total of @18 million confirmed cases. Thus the world mortality rate for covid 19 is @ 4% mortality world wide. If that is accurate then covid is 40 times more deadly than the common flu with a rate of only 0.1%
It’s quite apparent to all of us now that the Washington Post the NYT and other similar main stream media outlets are in the business of making the USA look bad—in every way they can—so as to deflate the political future of President Trump in the coming elections. But it is unconscionable that a newspaper of record such as the Post will go to such lengths in a purely informative piece of journalism.
From the LeMonde data we can see that the USA when compared to other highly populated affluent and advanced states is not the worst—and appears to be dealing with the corona virus pandemic as well as can be expected—and certainly not worse than other similar advanced states. These data are of course difficult to compare—population size, regimentation oor lack of it in a population, genetic homogeneity, cultural practices, existing morbidity factors, rates to obesity and heavy smoking etc etc etc can all have an effect on death rates.
But what we know now does not give anyone license to say that the President or administration has been remiss in its handling of the pandemic. Though some go to great lengths even to manipulating pandemic data to make that seem so. It is the Trump manic derangement syndrome—in attempting to hurt Trump they hurt us all and embarrass themselves.
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