Monday, March 22, 2021

Follow The Science

 Statistics is the science of crunching numbers.  It lets us tell the tale of populations, whether those populations are people, or the efficiency of a production line.

In this particular case, we're talking abut populations of humans, and historical data is the only data we have.  John Tierney writes at City Journal.

Now that the 2020 figures have been properly tallied, there’s still no convincing evidence that strict lockdowns reduced the death toll from Covid-19. But one effect is clear: more deaths from other causes, especially among the young and middle-aged, minorities, and the less affluent.

 The best gauge of the pandemic’s impact is what statisticians call “excess mortality,” which compares the overall number of deaths with the total in previous years. That measure rose among older Americans because of Covid-19, but it rose at an even sharper rate among people aged 15 to 54, and most of those excess deaths were not attributed to the virus.

We're just now able to gauge the true effects of the lockdowns on society  While the public health experts were myopically focused on the virus, they tended to overlook the other myriad issues that affect public health, to the  detriment of the population at large,  As the statisticians continue to crunch the numbers from 2020, we may learn that the lockdowns caused more human suffering than the virus did.

2 comments:

robert said...

And except when science says XY/XX chromozones mean Male and Female . Science has become a weapon .

kamas716 said...

This was warned about a year ago, but the politicians wouldn't listen to the people who could actually provide the historical statistics showing what to expect. Too many of our scientists and doctors have given up the scientific method for some temporary fame and money. Michael Z. Williamson was talking about this all last spring and summer.