It’s not the numbers

 Any mathematician will tell you that it’s not the numbers that are important but the pattern. Mathematicians look for the patterns in the numbers and finding them helps us to have a feeling of control. This understanding helps us make decisions that control a situation. If we have understood the pattern incorrectly then the control we take will have a negative outcome. 

Since this pandemic started the government have been throwing numbers at us. They’ve even tried to show us the patterns they see in those numbers with graphs and slides. If you are the type of person who prefers to look for their own patterns, or just got frustrated when they stopped going on TV to say, “Next slide please,” then you might have been looking at the numbers that they publish.

Over the weekend, they suddenly found thousands of positive cases that they hadn’t told us about before. No one is quite sure how or why or even what it means. However, they just popped them into the daily figures because, well, why not? There are several reasons why not but that didn’t seem to worry them. 

An extra  15,841 cases. That’s fine, we’ll just add them to the daily total with a note. If people have a calculator then they can work out that today’s figure is 7,120 and not the 22,961 we are telling them. They might even conclude that because those extra results were from several days over the last month then the numbers of daily infections are actually going down. However, if they don’t have a calculator, like to be scared or are too number phobic to look at what we are actually saying then they will just be frightened and that is very good for governments.

I’m not saying that there has actually been any thought put into this. It is most likely just a data entry error or computer senility but I have spotted a pattern.

The data that the government release is the basis of decisions that affect people’s lives. They have a duty to get that data right. If they change how the data is reported then it is impossible to make true comparisons. 

The pattern that I’ve spotted is that they keep making these kinds of mistakes. Death figures are now just those people who have died within 28 days of a positive test. Tests sometimes include someone who has been repeatedly tested and sometimes they only count that person once. Changes in how testing capacity has been counted have happened frequently. Occasionally, there is a spike in a figure that looks like it might have just been caused by the slip of a finger. The pattern is one of incompetence in the government data. 

I don’t want to extrapolate that incompetence finding to the rest of the government because that wouldn’t be very scientific but Boris was on the Andrew Marr show talking about a bumpy winter and hob nobs.