If you don’t understand statistics or risk, then I suppose that you would be.
A heartbroken twin sister is urging people to get vaccinated after her “superfit” brother refused the jab – and died of Covid four weeks after testing positive.
Mum-of-two Jenny McCann, 42, took her vaccination but her twin John Eyers refused.
Ironman and keen mountain climber John believed he would only suffer a “mild illness” because he was fit and healthy and turned down the jab.
But Jenny told how the family was hit by tragedy when dad-of-one John was taken to hospital with coronavirus and died a month later.
Jenny said: “He was the fittest, healthiest person I know. He was climbing Welsh mountains and wild camping four weeks before his death.
Perhaps the first thing to point out here is that it’s a bit premature to be writing off underlying complications. Without a post mortem, we don’t know.
Oh, hang on a minute…
Mr Eyers, of Southport, Merseyside, died after suffering an infection and organ failure four weeks after testing positive.
So he did have complications after all.
That aside, the reason that this case and the few others like it have made the national news is precisely because they are rare. The risk of dying from covid if you are young, fit and healthy is very small. This disease has a kill rate of less than 1% and those it kills are predominantly the elderly and those with some sort of underlying condition. Mr Eyers’ case is a tragedy and I’m sure that he did regret his decisions, but let’s make no mistake here, he is the exception, not the rule. For the vast majority, this disease is unpleasant but survivable.
So, to the media who are trying to scare the pants off us, nice try, but no cigar – well here, at least. I’m sure there are people who were scared by the headline death figures who will be suitably terrified.
The stats issue is the problem really, stats isn’t really maths in the classical sense, and I think only a third of people consider themselves good at maths.
There’s a fun book, The Power of Logical Thinking that makes the point quite nicely. The Monty Hall problem which is quite well known and understood is covered in the book and the point is made that it is still often answered incorrectly by statisticians.
Given that, I think its highly unlikely that terms such as confidence interval, standard deviation, standard error etc could be understood by the people the messaging is targeted at.
And I guess thats the point.
I don’t consider myself good at either stars or maths generally, but I can work out risk likelihood based upon the rate of occurrences. The risk of dying from covid is objectively low unless you are in a high risk group. It seems that most people can’t even do that.
Also worth mentioning that Matt Hancock appeared at one point to think that the PCR false positive rate meant that x% of the positives would be false rather than x% of tests.
Also covered in the book.
When you think about it almost all government programs/interventions have to have a strong basis in statistics since humans, their behaviour, medicine reactions all belong to continuous distributions. There’s maybe a case to say that there should be a minimum standard of maths required to an MP. Won’t happen of course.
When you have moonbats like Claudia Webb asking questions like,’why aren’t we taking Belarus to court, it’s evident that something is amiss.
Yes, the problem with assessing risk is simple I think and it could be made very clear on the broadcasting. It’s all relative of course and most don’t know the background risk of say, getting hit by a bus, or struck my lightning.
The risks of covid are trivial to almost everybody, and this was actually stated quite clearly early on in the lockdown. The nature of the messaging though changed. And it’s probably impossible to roll it back, I expect there will be permanent mask wearers.
There seems to be an underlying assumption that the vaccine would have saved him if he had decided to take it, there is no guarantee that this is the case. The effectiveness of the vaccine is obviously not brilliant otherwise we would be able to dispense with all the masks and sanitisers completely.
Oddly, the only person that I know personally that has died was a fit guy in his twenties. But I understand how rare this is. I have an underlying health problem but I’m also pretty fit. They tell me that my immune system is compromised but the last time that I had any kind of flu bug was a few weeks before the 2019 London Marathon.
“Oddly, the only person that I know personally that has died was a fit guy in his twenties.”
Fit guys in their 20s very occasionally just die naturally too. How often does one read about a sportsman having died from undiagnosed congenital heart defects? One such event nearly happened recently in the Euros with Christian Eriksen’s on field cardiac arrest (of course there is the vague suspicion that his heart attack might possibly have been covid vaccine related).
A very close friend lost his 21 year old son to such an event, he was as fit as a fiddle and just died in his sleep. Anyone at any age can die for inexplicable reasons, we as a society just prefer to pretend this doesn’t happen.
The real problem, or maybe problems, plural is that …
1: C-19 can be a very serous & even a killer disease [ NOTE – below ] & therefore taking rational steps to avoid or mitigate it is a sensible thing to do
2: The current misgovernment consists entirely of lying crooked chancers, trying thir profiteering skills on the British public. Which means that no-one with any sense id going to believe a word they say, right?
I trust you can see the “clash of cultures” problem here?
[ NOTE: I’m 75 am well double-vaccinated, but the prospect that scares me is the, admittedly remote possibility of getting “long Covid”.
Having watched a friend slowly die of ME ( CFS ) it gives me the creeps. ]