Death by the Numbers

Death by the Numbers
By Bobby Neal Winters
My education is in math.  I like to program computers. I’ve been learning how to use software that allows me to tabulate data.  And I have access to the internet.
This is a deadly combination especially these days.
You can access the COVID 19 data the New York Times tabulates with ease.  They keep the data on a county by county basis and this allows me to put it together in ways that are interesting to me rather than to the folks at the New York Times.  
For example, they’ve been keeping a cumulative account of cases and deaths.  I am interested in the new cases and the new deaths.  This is easy to get: You subtract yesterday’s totals from today’s.  
I do this and I graph it, and when I am in the mood, I share the graph with my Facebook friends.  It is an interesting exercise because real data is ‘spikey.’  The people who get the disease react as individuals and some get tested sooner, some get tested later.  This means that people who get exposed at the same time might get tested sooner or later than the rest of the group.  This means there might be fewer people tested on one day and more on another.  As a consequence there is either an increase or a decrease in the numbers.
As a cure to this, there is a standard technique for smoothing the data called a running average or a rolling average.  I calculate a running average for the previous seven days.  It brings the high numbers low and the low numbers high, smoothing things out.  The result of this is that you can spot trends.  
It doesn’t make for good headlines, though, because you can’t point to a single data point to say either “The number of cases is dramatically up” or “The number of cases has fallen drastically” for a single day.
I can also look at the data for Kansas City as a whole, rather than just the Kansas or the Missouri parts.  In addition, I can look at our area as a whole.  I do this two ways: A nine-county region and a 22-county region, both centered at Pittsburg.  In both cases, the numbers are relatively small.  In the 22-county region, there was one day with 3 deaths.  Yes, even one death is too many, but there is no comparison with the 1500 some deaths they had in one day in New York City.
To those who say, yes, but New York City has a higher population, proportionally they have had 1500 deaths per million population while the 22-county region surrounding us has had 28 deaths per million population.  They have had it much, much, much worse than us.
The next is a sensitive topic. COVID 19 has affected the elderly much worse than the young.  I came upon some CDC data that breaks it down by age.  Using data from the last week in May, one-third of the deaths have been people over the age of 85; almost 60 percent of the deaths are people over 75; 80 percent, people over 65; 92 percent, people over 55; 97.5 percent, people over 45.  
The flip side of this is that only about 2.5 percent of the people who have died are under the age of 45. (While this is a small percentage, over 2000 people in this age group have died in the US.)
Here is where I need to be very careful, and you do too because there are a lot of numbers here. If you are in your 20s, you consider anyone over 45 to be old.  I live with twentysomethings, so I know.  If you as a twentysomething know anyone who has died, that person--in your mind--has lived a good long life of at least 45 years.
This is what is called conditional data.  These are percentages of people who have died. For New York, which is the easiest to calculate, if you got the disease, there was about an 8 percent chance you died.  For people under 45, this would work out, roughly,  to about 2 in a thousand. That sounds small, but if you were going to a football game that 10,000 people were attending and you knew a gunman was going to kill 20 of those, would you go to the game?
But here’s the thing.  They aren’t planning to “go to the game,” i.e. get sick.  The disease itself is invisible and, because the people who get it are quarantined, we don’t see the effects. Young people especially.
So the previous four paragraphs are there to help you understand why there are people partying out on Lake of the Ozarks while the rest of us are scandalized by it.
After all these numbers, what do I mean to say?  Out here in the middle of the country we’ve been spared so far. Those of us who are older are relatively more at risk.  Beyond that my basis for saying anything becomes shaky. 
Be safe.
Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. )