Interesting essay from the new Wall Street Journal "Numbers Guy"
From the lede to this first article:
This is the first installment of The Numbers Guy, a new column on the way numbers and statistics are used - and abused - in the news, business and politics. I welcome your questions and comments, and will post and respond to your letters soon.
And the article:
Just How Deadly Is Bird Flu?
It Depends on Whom You Ask
The World Health Organization has a big problem: It needs to alert the public to the dangers of a virus that has killed very few people, yet could, in some scenarios, devastate nations across the globe.
So, the group's doctors and scientists have lately been forecasting truly alarming numbers from the so-called Asian bird flu -- up to 100 million deaths. One researcher has gone much further, suggesting the toll could be up to a billion people.
But projecting death counts from such a bug isn't just an inexact science; it's more like educated guesswork. The truth is, scientists don't know the rates at which this hypothetical flu - derived from a bird flu that so far in Asia doesn't spread well from human to human - could infect and kill. They base guesses on prior flu pandemics, but there's no way to quantify how much better we're prepared in 2005, thanks to improved vaccine production and antiviral medication, than we were in 1968, when the last flu pandemic struck.
Then again, the next pandemic could be worse than that relatively mild one, and even worse than the deadliest of the past century, in 1918, which killed at least 20 million people at a time when the world had a smaller population which traveled less.
The most responsible answer, then, to the question of how many people the flu will kill is, "We don't know." But big numbers get headlines while honest uncertainty usually doesn't. And the WHO has been sharing big numbers, like two million to seven million people dead world-wide. At a press conference in Hong Kong two months ago, one official went further, saying this hypothetical pandemic could kill as many as 100 million people. The WHO always cautions that these aren't sure numbers, but the group shouldn't be surprised that the press often skips the complexity.
The rest of the article is just as good and there are a couple emails from readers that are answered with a good level of thoroughness. I'll be following this column from now on.
The "Numbers Guy Central" website is here.
