[user104658]

Originally Posted by Mystic Mock

Not really because as Dezzy's already said on the thread, first or fifth is an atrocious showing for the UK, especially considering the four countries above us have way bigger populations than us so we may as well be number one on the overall death list.



I'm sorry but either way Toy Soldier's argument doesn't really hold up in this scenario.

I wasn't even arguing that the UK has done well/badly/whatever I just don't like dodgy graphic and stats that are of limited use . I don't think a tiered list that shows a small snapshot of time is particularly useful for knowing how well things have been handled; too easy to manipulate. If the same graph had been posted in August it would have looked like The UK had done amazingly because our deaths per million per day were way down.

I agree that the UK's overall deaths per capita are an obvious indication that we have been hammered hard, especially if you adjust for scale. I think anyone being totally honest knows there are multiple reasons for that - London's status as an international travel hub and the overall density of population in the UK are two big and uncontrollable factors - but I'm not going to say that it's been handled well or that the numbers wouldn't very possibly be lower if it had been. The government struggled to "pick a lane" so they flipped and flopped between telling people to stay home, and encouraging people to get back out... Things like "eat out to help out" and the heavy push to get consumers back onto the high street was in hindsight disastrous.

My argument is ONLY that taking a short span of time and graphing "who was worst in that small snapshot" is not a particularly useful metric.

[Mystic Mock]

Originally Posted by Toy Soldier

I wasn't even arguing that the UK has done well/badly/whatever I just don't like dodgy graphic and stats that are of limited use . I don't think a tiered list that shows a small snapshot of time is particularly useful for knowing how well things have been handled; too easy to manipulate. If the same graph had been posted in August it would have looked like The UK had done amazingly because our deaths per million per day were way down.

I agree that the UK's overall deaths per capita are an obvious indication that we have been hammered hard, especially if you adjust for scale. I think anyone being totally honest knows there are multiple reasons for that - London's status as an international travel hub and the overall density of population in the UK are two big and uncontrollable factors - but I'm not going to say that it's been handled well or that the numbers wouldn't very possibly be lower if it had been. The government struggled to "pick a lane" so they flipped and flopped between telling people to stay home, and encouraging people to get back out... Things like "eat out to help out" and the heavy push to get consumers back onto the high street was in hindsight disastrous.

My argument is ONLY that taking a short span of time and graphing "who was worst in that small snapshot" is not a particularly useful metric.

I get what you're saying, but to me the fact that we do badly in every type of death rate chart throughout most of the Pandemic does have to be taken seriously, even if the method of how the one on this thread has been counted is questionable.

To me if it was just a dodgy graphic or whatever I would be way less critical of the Tories handling of the disease, but sadly a lot of other graphics always show us high up on the death rates too.

[user104658]

Originally Posted by Mystic Mock

I get what you're saying, but to me the fact that we do badly in every type of death rate chart throughout most of the Pandemic does have to be taken seriously, even if the method of how the one on this thread has been counted is questionable.

To me if it was just a dodgy graphic or whatever I would be way less critical of the Tories handling of the disease, but sadly a lot of other graphics always show us high up on the death rates too.

Again I don't disagree but I would argue that if one has better stats and graphics that can be used to illustrate an argument, those are the ones that should be used, instead of cherry picking figures to create more graphs. It's a common media tactic but really all it does is create weak points in the argument that can easily be picked apart by a critic.

In short, you don't bolster existing robust statistics by including weaker contrived statistics... You actually knock the legs out from under them by introducing the element of doubt.