Taking a critical look at Covid statistics

I began my career as a Certified Public Accountant not a journalist. I say that only because I have been troubled by the reporting and decisions being made by our politicians concerning the Covid virus.

This virus is a serious disease. We should all be concerned about those who have contracted the virus and sad for the families that have lost loved ones.

The problem is the continual chant from the media and politicians is based on a faulty interpretation of the statistics. This article takes a critical look at the numbers available from multiple sources including, Google, Wikipedia, and John Hopkins.

This article results from what appears to be inadequate research by the major media resulting in often confusing if not outright distortion of the facts.

As a 40-year veteran of the news industry, I am aware that most journalists cannot properly decipher statistics. Numbers in general are a blind spot they are incapable of understanding. To make matters worse the electronic media in general must sensationalize every story. Without the latest crisis to exploit they live in continual fear of falling ratings. This often makes the real story worse than it really is and drives bad decisions by politicians who need to have some disaster they can promise to fix.

One of the comments I hear regularly on the evening news is the United States has the most deaths of any country in the world. While that is numerically an accurate read of the available statistics, it is irrelevant.

The accompanying chart provides a summary of the numbers regarding the Covid virus and how it is impacting all of us. My chart presents the data sorted by population. The US is the third largest country in the world. China and India both have four times the population of the US.

The virus is said to have originated in China. Yet, China is reporting they only have 89,814 confirmed cases of the virus. That is only 1.5 % of the number of cases in the US. More importantly, it is only six one thousandth of their population. It stresses the sense of credulity.

The problem with comparing death rates to the number of confirmed cases is we do not know how thorough and accurate the testing was done or reported. We do know a large percentage of people that have tested positive have been asymptomatic. In other words, their symptoms were so mild that they didn’t even know they had the disease.

We also do not know if the number of reported deaths from Covid is being accurately reported. For example, there are news reports that claim Mexico’s death rate is much higher than is being officially reported.

All of these numbers are difficult to compare since we do not know how widespread the testing has been or the accuracy of the actual death counts. There does appear to be at least one statistic that appears to be consistent across the globe. That is deaths as a percentage of the population. Ignoring the two extremely low, and questionable numbers for China and Nigeria, it appears only .01 to .06 percent of the population is dying from this pandemic. That means, 99.94 to 99.99 percent of the all the people on this planet have either never contracted the disease, didn’t know they had the disease or have survived it.

In the United States, 99.9452% of the population has survived the disease.

In Washington state, 99.974% of the population has survived.

I have included the numbers from Sweden because many people have claimed Sweden, which has not mandated wearing of masks, as an example of a country that has done a better of managing the pandemic. These numbers do not support that theory.

Washington’s Governor, Jay Inslee, has set a goal of 25 cases per 100,000 population over the previous 2 weeks in order to allow counties in Washington state to begin to reopen their schools and their economy. This is an arbitrary and highly prejudicial test that severely hampers the economic recovery of the small communities across the state. The governor’s goal means the state must have fewer than 1905 new cases in the lookback period or .0003 percent of the state’s population to move to phase 2. In the case of Chelan County the goal would be 20 cases or .0336 percent. In other words, it is 112 times more difficult for Chelan County to achieve the Governor’s goal. In Okanogan and Douglas County it is 195 times more difficult for the county to meet the governor’s goal.

It is time we begin to ask the question. Does it make any sense to destroy people’s livelihoods, close our schools, shutdown church attendance, or eliminate sporting events when the survivability of this disease is more than 99.8 percent?

Covid is clearly a serious disease. When it was first identified, we had limited knowledge of how to treat it. That has changed. Like too many issues in today’s world it has become politicized.

In the interest of full disclosure. I am 73 years young. I have diabetes. I have been at work everyday since this pandemic began. I do not want to get it but according to the medical experts I am highly susceptible. My business remains open because it is considered essential, however, I would not be able to continue to publish your newspaper without the financial assistance I received from the CARES Act.