I’ve decided to understand a bit more about the statistics when it comes to the pandemic. I find it bizarre that in this world politics is interwoven in everything we see, hear, say and do. The media is inherently politically driven in one way or another and I find it hard to discern between information presented in a scientific way, and the underlying science itself.

Science is, at the end of the day, a mechanism to identify a truth. The mechanism is typically test driven, but in most circumstances instead of a 100% truth, it provides a way to remove as many improbably variations as it can, so what you’re left with is as close to the truth as you can get.

I kind of like this argument (I think I may have paraphrased it from something on my travels). I also like the some Dara O’Brian said in a stand up on time:

“Science knows it doesn’t know everything, that doesn’t mean you can some along and fill in the blanks”

I’ve really gone of on a tangent, so back to politics and datasets. It shouldn’t matter if your left, right, pro-vaxx, anti-vaxx. There should be some common source of truth that powers statistics and therefore the information we can transform them into.

With that said, I’m going on a mini-mission to try and understand the COVID data landscape and better get a handle on ‘information’ that’s presented by the media.