(Part I of “Statistics and the Pandemic”)
May 29, 2021 — Mark Twain said, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Too often, the pandemic has unnecessarily allowed scope for the sort of popular suspicions reflected in Twain’s bon mot.
Statistics are in fact a critical component of the fight against Covid-19. Their use ranges from judging the efficacy of different vaccines to judging the performance of different governments.
But throughout the pandemic, comparisons across countries have focused too much on the wrong statistics. The problem is worse than impeding voters’ evaluation of governments’ performance. The focus on the wrong metrics has given some political leaders a strong incentive to under-react to the pandemic, to suppress testing for example, and thus has arguably contributed to the loss of millions of lives.