Covid-19 patients in hospitals in England have surged by 62% in a week, the first NHS data released after Christmas revealed.
Eeek! Run for the hills.
Oh, wait… Without context, that’s meaningless. 62% of what, exactly? Given that hospital occupancy for covid was 5% before Christmas, it’s 62% of that? Oh, yeah, we are now up to 6% occupancy in the middle of the flu season and 7% of beds are unoccupied.
Even in the Mirror’s own story, it shows just how desperate they are to make something out of nothing much. Remember an increase of 1 to 2 is a 100% increase. Unless you have context, percentages don’t tell you anything.
The latest seven-day average of new Covid cases recorded for 24 December was 2,117, which is 62% up on 1,305 a week previously.
Out of a population of nearly 70 million.
Nothing to see here. As you were…
Is this 2,117 figure people who are actually seriously ill? Because if it includes those who are only mildly affected then it’s over. Even if this is only the serious cases, as you say, a couple of thousand out of seventy million is almost nothing. One in 350,000 doing it in my head. So let’s return to normal with immediate effect eh Boris.
Been for a quick shop to Asda today, masking appeared to be down slightly.
I ventured into the centre of Glasgow yesterday. I only saw one other person unmasked indoors. Very depressing. Things were looking up a few weeks ago, but the fearmongering seems to be working as intended.
(By the way, Christmas dinner was pleasant… but weird, with the odd awkward moment over the bottles of hand-sanitizer on the table. Yes, really. Our hostess is a nurse; she should surely know that it’s well established by now that SARS-CoV-2 is an entirely airborne virus, and there’s been no known transmission by contact. But that’s the problem; she is a nurse, so there’s no arguing with her.)
It’s the same with absolute numbers, not just percentages.
“OMG! There are 8000 beds taken by Covid patients!”
Me: “and? How many beds are there?”
If there’s 8001 beds, that’s a problem.
If there’s 80000 beds, it doesn’t matter.
But giving this sort of context wouldn’t keep people scared…
Exactly. At the beginning of this, they were using absolute numbers and ignoring the context of population size. Then they switched to percentages, again without context. So few people seem equipped to see through the bullshit.
https://youtu.be/xBEUryp2n94
I’ve commented on that one.