distorted? expedient? what's the agenda?

"every day sadder and sadder news of its increase. in the city died this week 7,496, and of them, 6,102 of the plague. but it is feared that the true number of the dead this week is near 10,000, partly from the poor that cannot be taken notice of" samuel pepys diary 31 august 1665.__________

not to belabor a point...however, in the words of the federalist papers, ""the same subject continued"...statistical analysis depends quite a bit on who is doing the counting and why...you can cook any sort of book and twist figures around to fit any theory...or just support a point of view..it might be helpful in looking at this to know what the point of view is...that seems obscure in places, direct in others...

over at the times...

they at least agree with me that the deaths in new york account for around 40% of the national total...saddening as this is now as it was for pepys one is forced to think that the numbers are as inaccurate as pepys found them...

to begin with the times is lumping geographical areas together...chicago-naperville-elgin,il-in-wi...

is not the cook illiniois ( which is pretty much chicago ) listed over at johns hopkins...

and los angeles-long beach-anaheim-ca, may or may not be the greater los angeles metropolitan area however...the numbers do not match...

and new york-newark-jerey city,ny-nj-pa...is not new york city...so it boils down to who is doing the counting and who has the freshest numbers and who has what reason for counting...whether it is just a simplification or a distortion would depend on motive and i have no idea what the media has in mind...i presume johns hopkins is trying to portray an accurate picture of events since i don't think they are selling anything...what this does manage to do ...along with the stale numbers from yesterday put up by the cdc...is confuse the issue more than it need be...competing numbers are not in anyone's best interest at the moment...seems that is what we have... the dissonance is a distraction...the huge difference in death totals between metropolitan areas is disconcerting...why? an important correspondent to this blog points out that los angeles is more spread out and, more importantly, has virtually no public transit...it is a car culture where no one walks and everyone is alone in their vehicles...social distancing via transportation which would seem to be a large factor in the difference...an epiphany...so we are still staying at home as much as possible...which can be tedious but the need is understandable...and trying to make some sort of sense out of the numbers...success with the numbers is questionable...so far we seem healthy.