Sweetheart, get me rewrite. I’ve got a barnburner for Page One: Britain has just surpassed Italy in coronavirus
deaths!
Not. “Even if
all deaths across Europe and the world were reported in the same way – which they
are not,” intones the Washington Post,
“Italy has a population of 60 million to Britain’s 66 million, so direct
comparisons must be adjusted.” Yes! And...what is the adjustment?
You’ll never find out from the Post, although the calculations take no longer than washing your
hands once or singing “Happy Birthday” twice.
Using the Post’s own figures,
the per capita death toll is 29,427/66,000,000 in Britain and 29,315/60,000,000
in Italy. To make the numbers easier to
understand, compute the number of deaths per million people: (29,427*1,000,000)/66,000,000 and (29,315*1,000,000)/60,000,000,
or 29,427/66 and 29,315/60. That works
out to 446 per million Brits and 489 per million Italians, so I guess we don’t
have a Page One story after all.
The real story is this: Why can’t journalists do
fourth-grade math? In that regard, Kazakhstan is no better than Washington. The government’s mouthpiece, Kazinform,
reports 4,344 covid-19 cases for Kazakhstan and 1,392 for Almaty alone; but it
never works out the infection rates. The
population is 18.7 million for Kazakhstan and 1.9 million for metro Almaty, so
the number of cases per million residents is 4,344/18.7 and 1,392/1.9, or 232
for Kazakhstan and 733 for Almaty. Since
the City of Apples is more dense than land-rich Kazakhstan, the difference in infection
rates is no surprise but striking nonetheless. –Leon Taylor
tayloralmaty@gmail.com
References
William Booth and Karla Adam. 2020. Britain reports Europe’s highest death
toll, passing Italy. Washington Post. May 6. www.washingtonpost.com
Kazinform. 2020. 46 more Kazakhstanis tested
positive for coronavirus, total at 4,344. May 6. www.inform.kz
