Mr. Nix
As a rookie teacher, back in 1978, I was fortunate enough to have an outstanding Principal. Mr. Pete Nix was an amazing role model: strong, caring, an administrator who “had your back” but still held you accountable. Pete taught me a lot, and let me “in” on what it was like to be the head of the high school in a small town. And, as a proud product of Alabama, Pete had a whole textbook of sayings that summed up almost any situation. As far as statistics were concerned, Pete would say, “…figures lie, and liars figure”.
I’ve always held that particular saying close. As education, and many other parts of our computerized and digitized world changed, I keep remembering it. Figures can be made to back any side, any view. Numbers can be intimidating, and can seem unalterably correct. But they often aren’t.
Politics and Numbers
Today, the death toll of COVID-19 crossed the 95,000 mark here in the United States. We are, by far, the worst hit nation in the world, with more than a quarter of all cases, and all deaths. But we also know that China, still only claiming 4,634 deaths, may well be doing some figuring, and some lying. They want to look as if they had everything under control from the beginning. It’s not even a matter of “fault”, but China clearly didn’t have much control over the virus. What they did manage to control was the information flow. We may never know how many died or are dying there.
Politics is driving many of the “numbers” about COVID-19 here in the United States. Let’s get a couple of points clear. First, everyone wants the economy to “open up”. The whole storyline damning the Democrats for wanting to keep the nation closed in order to win the November election is, well, Bull. Democrats are the most likely folks most damaged by the economy being closed, of course they want it re-opened.
What Democrats Want
But here’s the problem, Democrats are also likely to be the folks employed in the jobs that put them most at risk. If you can stay home and work from the kitchen table or the couch, you have a lot of control over your risk of exposure to the virus. But if you drive the city bus, or work at the restaurant, or stand on the line at the meat packing plant, you’ve got to go to work. You are at risk. The figures from New York show it, as the percentage of minority deaths soar far above their percentage of the population. That’s no lie.
No, what Democrats want is the nation to open safely. Republicans should want it too; after all, if the virus ignites and fills the hospitals, whatever economic (or political) gains from “opening” the economy will be lost. And, for the President of the United States, facing an election based on his handling of this crisis, so will the election.
Political Distancing
We have “social distancing” today, but the President has done a different kind of distancing. He has distanced himself from responsibility for whatever happens in the next few months. Instead of taking control of the situation on a national basis, as Presidents have done in past crises, Mr. Trump has pushed the “responsibility” to the Governors of the states.
But once he gave them responsibility, he immediately began to use his “bully pulpit” to demand that they open up their states. That pressure was inexorable: since the Federal financial response for individual workers turned out to be pretty anemic, they need the jobs. So the Governors are stuck: keep the economy closed and control the virus, open up and risk explosive infection and overwhelmed hospitals. As far as the President is concerned, opening the economy is “on him,” increases in infection are somebody else’s fault.
The Tests
The biggest failure of the Federal government has been testing. And today we found out something else: that while the Administration has absolutely increased testing, we now find that the different tests are all being agglomerated into one figure.
What does all that mean? So there are two kinds of tests for COVID-19. One is a viral test: it detects whether you are suffering from the virus NOW. It’s the test you need to have if you want to test workers at a plant, or students at a school. You don’t care whether someone had the virus at one time or another; you want to know whether they are currently infected.
The other kind of test is the antibody test. It detects if you have had the virus at some point in the past. Perhaps someday, that will give us some information about whether you have some immunity to future infection, and for how long. We don’t know the answer to that yet, but we need to hope there is some longer-term immunity. That’s when the whole “herd immunity” idea kicks in, that if enough people are immune, than the virus won’t be able to be as infective. Then we can isolate the higher risk folks, and let others go back to their lives.
Liars Figure
But if you are a Governor, trying to keep you finger on the pulse of infection in your state, you need the first test. You need to know if current infections are increasing or not. Whether folks had the virus in the past, is good information to know, but not directly useful in making immediate decisions for your state. Sure, they can wait until hospital admissions go up; but that’s a fourteen-day lag. By the time Governors have that data, it’s late.
The Centers for Disease Control has been taking the numbers from both tests and putting them together. If Governors depend on those testing numbers to tell them what’s happening, the information from those combined tests doesn’t help.
After all of the political fuss over testing, it shouldn’t be a surprise that CDC is putting out figures that look like they’re testing a whole lot of people. The President, and the Administration, after neglecting testing for months, turned and made it their biggest talking point. The CDC needs to “please” their President, and bigger numbers are better. Two sets of numbers, for each type of tests doesn’t sound as good. The problem is, those combined numbers won’t help anyone make the difficult decision of “opening the economy” or not.
Figures lie, and liars figure.
