Posted 30 April 2020
One of my original motivations for creating these daily COVID posts was the feel that the mainstream media were not giving us a fair deal. Too many reactionary, accusatory and sensationalist headlines lay between us (the ‘consumer’) and the real news, the real data.
I still feel this.
This morning I reflected on a piece I wrote last Autumn about the role Social Media was playing in distorting our lives (it concerned raincoats and umbrellas) and I feel that six months on, not only is this sentiment still very relevant but worthy of being expanded to ‘mainstream’ media too. [I might well repost that old piece – without amendment – so that you may judge for yourselves.]
My concern with the media’s role in creating a pandemic of fear is exemplified by a headline from yesterday:
“Coronavirus as deadly as Ebola in hospitals”.
Wow, if you weren’t afraid before you would be now! This was the BBC. Am I being overly nostalgic to think that once the BBC News was a model of balanced and fair news delivery?
As a statistician (that made me chuckle. I started that sentence without thought and then checked myself: “Am I really a statistician once more?” That’s probably a discussion piece for another time) there is a duty to report on data as objectively as possible. Analyse, but be self-critical, find your own flaws and limitations to be as balanced possible. Naively perhaps I feel the News should do the same.
I truly think I am naive in that regard and yesterday’s Ebola comparison highlighted that.
News is now a very competitive market. If you (as the consumer of news) so wish, you can have the latest world events thrown at you every moment of your waking day and from myriad sources. Social media and ‘mainstream’ media are 24/7 vying with each other for your attention and seemingly they can be quite ruthless in how they get it. Long gone are the days of ‘just’ news; now everything has to be ‘breaking news’, ‘news just in’. Every piece of news has to stir a primary emotion, enrage you, make you afraid, make you worry, make you sad.
Your clicks are the currency that define their success and so as never before, the world is shaped by the latest emotion-triggering click-bait.
But I can see the problem. Compare:
“Today there were 500 deaths associated with COVID-19; there were also 1200 non-COVID deaths today. Of the 500 reported COVID deaths, many are likely to be related to other causes but because the patient had contacted COVID-19, they will be recorded as deaths linked to coronavirus. The average age of the COVID related deaths was 80”.
with:
“Deaths from deadly virus soar by 500”
Both reporting the same thing but it is clear which one is going to get the clicks. “Deadly” and “soar” (and brevity) make all the difference.
And perhaps it is as much the consumer’s fault. The 21st century ‘tic’ is that we cannot put our phones down. Our electronic gadgets tantalisingly give us glimpses that perhaps somewhere, someone, somehow is having a better time than us, or a worse time depending on whether you are a glass half full or half empty sort of person. Our endorphin addiction means that every fifteen minutes we are going to delve back into our Social Media channels to confirm this. Perhaps we love the endorphin burst we get from ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ (I am no less guilty of that than the next man). So every time we pick up our phones all the news channels have to be there lying in wait with their next emotion-stirring click bait. The headline from an hour ago is just not going to cut it. The media have to maintain a momentum in their news delivery that our endorphin-driven attention spans demand.
So what about the Ebola vs Coronavirus story. The underlying datum that drove the headline was from a large study (“the largest in Europe”) that one third of all those hospitalised with COVID-19 died. Shocking, of course. But the statistician in me would raise the following points (akin to taking out the “deadly” and the “soar” and disregarding the need for brevity, from my own headline example):
- Large study does not mean the best study. It might, but the way the news story used this phrase to trump all our previous knowledge is guaranteed to get the hackles-up of any statistician. Maybe, but let me see the methods and the data.
- Straightaway it raises questions: Until last week, here in the UK we have been PCR testing patients as they enter hospitals. Notwithstanding reliability issues with the tests, we have therefore a reasonably accurate estimate of COVID patients entering hospitals and how many of them die. The Case Fatality Rate (CFR) from these data had been running at around 10-15%. To claim that now it is 33% would raise some big issues on data capture and analysis in order to reconcile the different numbers.
- It worries me that the referenced paper calls the 33% figure a ‘crude Case Fatality Rate’. Why crude? Discuss.
- Elephant in the room time: The average age of a COVID death in the UK is 79.3. I do not have the data, but I suspect a large percentage of near 80 year olds who enter hospital with any infectious illness will die. COVID or no COVID. Ebola may have the same ‘crude Case Fatality Rate’ (see my previous point) but those deaths are not the preserve of the elderly: Ebola is the deadly snake in the grass or the lightning strike – it could get any one with equal impunity. Coronavirus seems by contrast to be ageist.
The article, once one gets past the headline, does however have some very useful analysis and confirmation of previously seen trends:
– The study confirmed that more men die than women. The difference in outcome for the sexes increases with age.
– The study questions whether ventilation in intensive care is having a measurable benefit on outcomes and suggests that there should be ‘appropriate’ and ‘mature’ discussion about this in hospitals.
– Obesity is a strong correlate with poor health outcomes.
– Ethnicity and COVID outcome was analysed. It has been noted in many studies that certain ethnic groups do correlate with poorer COVID outcomes. This study reports: “When we match everything except ethnicity, the differences in outcome disappear and that would suggest ethnicity in itself is not what is causing the poor outcomes”. This implies that if you separately analyse the data for (say) obesity and type II diabetes, then the ethnicity no longer appears as a correlate. So, it is the increased prevalence of those selected co-morbidities in certain ethnic groups that correlates with the worse outcomes rather than ethnicity itself.
So that article did have a useful contribution after all but I doubt that message got to most. The headline would have us cowering behind our sofas rather than reading the rest of the article.
Maybe the simple act of turning your phone off could thwart the spread of the pandemic of fear?