You’re touching on what this whole thing is. It’s rushed and woefully incomplete data enabling media companies to write apocalyptic headlines without exposing

You’re touching on what this whole thing is. It’s rushed and woefully incomplete data enabling media companies to write apocalyptic headlines without exposing themselves to any legal liability. They have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders, so that’s what they’re doing. I think to most people with a background in statistics it’s very easy to tell how bad the data is at a glance. It’s downright blatant. They don’t have a platform though, because in this media climate your platform is only as big as your level of sensationalism and hysteria. There are multiple factors skewing the data toward coronavirus appearing more deadly than it actually is. It’s new and sudden, so there wasn’t a lot of infrastructure in place for testing. It’s causing a rush on hospitals. Combine those and you have one massive shortage of testing. You obviously want to care for the most critically ill first, so globally, only the most sick get tested, and only the cases most likely to be fatal are even represented in these numbers everyone is seeing. Then they take wildly differing medical, economic and political environments all over the world, and merge all the data as if it’s equal. In many cases, in addition to the inadequate testing, that data is only as accurate as their governing bodies want it to be. Do we really believe there are 5x as many cases in the US as in China? Do we really believe there were only 5,000 cases in India? Do we really believe the virus is 10x as likely to be fatal in Italy as compared to Germany? Take the “confirmed cases” number and just add a zero, and you might be closer to the reality of what’s going on out there. People are simply blind to the difference between “confirmed cases” and “cases”. It’s very unfortunate that this nomenclature has a natural tendency to make “confirmed cases” feel like it must be more accurate, and also unfortunate that the term “cases” could only ever be an approximation. But those labels were chosen carefully and for a good reason, and they represent very, very different things.