Lemme tell you a story. Years ago during the pandemic early days, a harvard epidemiology student asked me to proof-read his paper that argued that covid-19 kil

Lemme tell you a story. Years ago during the pandemic early days, a harvard epidemiology student asked me to proof-read his paper that argued that covid-19 killed more white people than any other race. The dataset he used was the Cook County Medical Examiner dataset. There was a column in there for the race information. If you're curious how it's populated, I can share with you the information. Previously, I'd FOIA'd the data and received many more columns of information including the names of the individuals who'd died which showed a very clear pattern that the race information on the open data portal was not always accurate for Hispanic-origin names. The details are complicated, and I'm happy to explain my fact checking methods, but the Harvard student's analysis was just flat wrong because it made assumptions that the race data was correct. It was not. Their response was initially along the lines of, "even if it's 50% it's still going to be true". It ended up being more like 80%, showing that people with Hispanic-origin names were significantly more likely to die of COVID-19. If you think your audience isn't academics at mega institutions who believe that open data is 100% accurate data, then you've made many incorrect assumptions and I encourage you to reconsider.