Now Everyone's a Statistician. Here's What Armchair COVID Experts Are Getting Wrong

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

Now everyone's a statistician. Here's what armchair COVID experts are getting wrong.:

If we don't analyze statistics for a living, it's easy to be taken in by misinformation about COVID-19 statistics on social media, especially if we don't have the right context.

For instance, we may cherry pick statistics supporting our viewpoint and ignore statistics showing we are wrong. We also still need to correctly interpret these statistics.

It's easy for us to share this misinformation. Many of these statistics are also interrelated, so misunderstandings can quickly multiply.

Here's how we can avoid five common errors, and impress friends and family by getting the statistics right.

1. It's the infection rate that's scary, not the death rate
2. Exponential growth and misleading graphs
3. Not all infections are cases
4. We can't compare deaths with cases from the same date
5. Yes, the data are messy, incomplete and may change

Original Submission

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