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> The Spanish flu was previously the disease event that caused the biggest loss of life in the United States; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention est

by hbn 5y ago

> The Spanish flu was previously the disease event that caused the biggest loss of life in the United States; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that 675,000 Americans died during the 1918 pandemic, in waves of illness that stretched out over roughly two years in this country. > According to STAT’s Covid-19 Tracker, Covid deaths stand at more than 675,400. Why are we comparing raw numbers? If one disease killed 4 people in a population of 5, and another disease killed 20 people in a population of a billion, I wouldn't say the second disease is "more deadly." Not to mention life expectancy went from under 40 to above 70 in the last century, so we have way more elderly people around.

throwaway0a5e 5y ago
>Why are we comparing raw numbers? For the clicks and eyeballs. Bigger numbers make better headlines. This is journalism 101.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  So much noise, so little signal.
gruez 5y ago
yeah this sounds like "top grossing movie" phenomenon. Since the movie market is always growing and there's inflation, a top grossing movie today doesn't necessarily mean it's more successful/popular. eg. if you consider avatar (2009) which grossed $2.8B and titanic (1997) which only grossed $2.2B, titanic is actually the top grossing one once you account for inflation.
phreeza 5y ago
Because otherwise a car crash in a small town would be equivalent to a major terror attack in NYC, or Jack the ripper could be considered a minor offender compared to a modern day involuntary manslaughter. There is a time and place for normalized statistics, but for some situations, loss of life is something that matters. Edit: I got the arrow of time mixed up in the jack the ripper example, but you get the idea.
- mistermann 5y ago
  An illustration of lies, damn lies, and statistics?
- gruez 5y ago
  >Because otherwise a car crash in a small town would be equivalent to a major terror attack in NYC You can probably adjust for this using some sort of statistical significance test. However, without actually doing the test I'll go on a limb and say that the world's population wasn't small enough in 1918 that this phenomena (ie. n being too small) would skew the results.
  - rich_sasha 5y ago
    World population in 1920 was presumably somewhere between 1.6bn and 2bn: https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-population-by-year/ https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-populat... so 4-5x smaller than now.
    - gruez 5y ago
      Right, but that's not small enough to make a difference. To go to the extreme, if your population size was 100, and some guy died of the flu, that's a 1% death rate! That doesn't actually mean the death rate of the flu is actually 1%, because you don't know whether that guy just happened to die because your group was unlucky, or that the death rate is 1%. As your population size gets bigger this becomes less of a problem. For instance, if your population was 1,000,000 and 10,000 died of the flu you can be fairly certain the death rate is actually 1%. With that in mind, you can intuit that the difference between between 1.6bn and 2bn (1920) and 7 billion (today) is negligible, although feel free to quantify this with actual calculations.
      - rich_sasha 5y ago
        Ah if it’s just about significance (I thought you were arguing about rate of death being negligibly different) then agreed, little difference. In this kind of scenario, errors decrease like 1/sqrt(sample size) so quadrupling the sample size leads to halving the error (which was tiny to start off with). If 1 out of 20 die of flu, the frequentist 1 sigma error is roughly 5% too, so same order of magnitude as the probability estimate. Different story with a hierarchical Bayesian model etc.
jasonlotito 5y ago
> Why are we comparing raw numbers? Because it’s one of many ways to look at this disease, and any reasonably intelligent person will understand that this one comparison doesn’t tell you the whole story, but it does tell a story. The story goes into explaining this more, and also why we might not want to compare this to the 1918 pandemic itself. I mean, the article addresses pretty much everything you mention in your comment, so I’m not sure why you bothered posting.
timbit42 5y ago
Don't forget to account for the fact they didn't have vaccines during the 1918 pandemic.
pupppet 5y ago
You’re arguing that as population increases, individual lives become less important?
- xboxnolifes 5y ago
  No, he's arguing that if you randomly shoot a gun a few times into a room, you'll probably hit more people if it has 100 people inside rather than 5. And that the gun didn't become more deadly just because the number of targets increased.
  - pupppet 5y ago
    That's fair.
CodeGlitch 5y ago
> Not to mention life expectancy went from under 40 to above 70 in the last century, so we have way more elderly people around. Yes but we also have vastly superior medical knowledge and technology and resources to draw on...but despite that it has still killed 675,400 people in the US alone.

by hbn 5y ago

throwaway0a5e 5y ago

>Why are we comparing raw numbers? For the clicks and eyeballs. Bigger numbers make better headlines. This is journalism 101.

lotsofpulp 5y ago
So much noise, so little signal.

gruez 5y ago

yeah this sounds like "top grossing movie" phenomenon. Since the movie market is always growing and there's inflation, a top grossing movie today doesn't necessarily mean it's more successful/popular. eg. if you consider avatar (2009) which grossed $2.8B and titanic (1997) which only grossed $2.2B, titanic is actually the top grossing one once you account for inflation.

phreeza 5y ago

Because otherwise a car crash in a small town would be equivalent to a major terror attack in NYC, or Jack the ripper could be considered a minor offender compared to a modern day involuntary manslaughter. There is a time and place for normalized statistics, but for some situations, loss of life is something that matters. Edit: I got the arrow of time mixed up in the jack the ripper example, but you get the idea.

mistermann 5y ago
An illustration of lies, damn lies, and statistics?
gruez 5y ago
>Because otherwise a car crash in a small town would be equivalent to a major terror attack in NYC You can probably adjust for this using some sort of statistical significance test. However, without actually doing the test I'll go on a limb and say that the world's population wasn't small enough in 1918 that this phenomena (ie. n being too small) would skew the results.
- rich_sasha 5y ago
  World population in 1920 was presumably somewhere between 1.6bn and 2bn: https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-population-by-year/ https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-populat... so 4-5x smaller than now.
  - gruez 5y ago
    Right, but that's not small enough to make a difference. To go to the extreme, if your population size was 100, and some guy died of the flu, that's a 1% death rate! That doesn't actually mean the death rate of the flu is actually 1%, because you don't know whether that guy just happened to die because your group was unlucky, or that the death rate is 1%. As your population size gets bigger this becomes less of a problem. For instance, if your population was 1,000,000 and 10,000 died of the flu you can be fairly certain the death rate is actually 1%. With that in mind, you can intuit that the difference between between 1.6bn and 2bn (1920) and 7 billion (today) is negligible, although feel free to quantify this with actual calculations.
    - rich_sasha 5y ago
      Ah if it’s just about significance (I thought you were arguing about rate of death being negligibly different) then agreed, little difference. In this kind of scenario, errors decrease like 1/sqrt(sample size) so quadrupling the sample size leads to halving the error (which was tiny to start off with). If 1 out of 20 die of flu, the frequentist 1 sigma error is roughly 5% too, so same order of magnitude as the probability estimate. Different story with a hierarchical Bayesian model etc.

jasonlotito 5y ago

> Why are we comparing raw numbers? Because it’s one of many ways to look at this disease, and any reasonably intelligent person will understand that this one comparison doesn’t tell you the whole story, but it does tell a story. The story goes into explaining this more, and also why we might not want to compare this to the 1918 pandemic itself. I mean, the article addresses pretty much everything you mention in your comment, so I’m not sure why you bothered posting.

timbit42 5y ago

Don't forget to account for the fact they didn't have vaccines during the 1918 pandemic.

pupppet 5y ago

You’re arguing that as population increases, individual lives become less important?

xboxnolifes 5y ago
No, he's arguing that if you randomly shoot a gun a few times into a room, you'll probably hit more people if it has 100 people inside rather than 5. And that the gun didn't become more deadly just because the number of targets increased.
- pupppet 5y ago
  That's fair.

CodeGlitch 5y ago

> Not to mention life expectancy went from under 40 to above 70 in the last century, so we have way more elderly people around. Yes but we also have vastly superior medical knowledge and technology and resources to draw on...but despite that it has still killed 675,400 people in the US alone.