Posted 8 June 2020
“You can always hide the truth behind a few well chosen facts”
This graphic showing deaths has been doing the rounds on Facebook for a while. Whilst I admire the effort spent in creating it and love its visual impact, it is sadly little more than scaremongery.
To summarise it: It is a bar chart plotting the number of global deaths attributed to various causes between 1 January and 21 May 2020. Each bar represents a different cause of death. The bars are ranked in order with the largest contributor to death at the top. As the sequence progresses COVID deaths move from the bottom of the list to the top. By 21 May, 330,000+ deaths are attributed to COVID.
All very scary. And of course, that is what the sharers of this post want – they want you to be scared.
But is it justified?
When someone creates a graphic like this, beware the pitfalls of being drawn into the ‘magic trick’. The author of this piece, like a magician at work, directs you to look in a particular direction for the trick to work. To see through the trick you need to look up the magician’s sleeves and find the things he does not want you to look at.
Fortunately, seeing through this particular trick is easy.
If you take the final frame from this video, the total deaths between 1 January and 21 May add up to a little under 2 million. That sounds a lot doesn’t it? But do you know the global total of deaths last year? Sixty million (60,000,000). Using a simple pro rata calculation, around 24 million of those would have died between 1 January and 21 May, the same time period as our clever graphic.
Do you now see the magic trick? Our slick little graphic that wants to make us scared of COVID has shown only one twelfth of all the deaths so far this year. And COVID19 has caused only one sixth of those (330,000 of the 2,000,000).
The author has of course cherry-picked the causes of death in his graph to be just the ones that COVID ‘trumps’. Terrorism, natural disasters and fire are easily beaten by a pandemic virus. What COVID will struggle to beat are suicides, cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, diabetic complications, strokes, Alzheimers, pneumonia and chronic respiratory disease. And so on. And so on. Diabetic deaths alone in the first five months of 2020 will exceed all of the deaths shown in the graphic (and remember COVID19 is just one sixth of those).
But there is a very harmful side effect of the statistical shenanigans crafted here. The Facebook posts sharing this graphical sequence are under no illusion that you should be scared. And they extrapolate that fear into a warning that staying in lockdown until you are told to come out is the only safe and sensible place to be. “Look at how deadly COVID19 is” is the strapline.
What they don’t want you to realise is that the longer we stay in lockdown the more we will increase the deaths in those hidden-away categories. Suicides will increase. Undiagnosed cancers and their delayed treatment will cost lives. Unchecked heart disease will prematurely end lives. Diabetes and its complications will worsen in many. Those with chronic illness who have absorbed this ever-repeating message of fear will be too afraid to seek treatment for their potentially life threatening illnesses.
Just a five percent increase in these conditions over the next year will cause four times as many deaths than COVID19 in the longer term. And whereas COVID19 kills predominantly those over 80 (half of all COVID deaths occur in those over 82), extra deaths to these other causes in the coming years will be less discriminating on age and affect those in their 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s.
Fear itself kills and through social media it is more contagious than a virus. Every time someone presses the ‘Share’ button on this video and posts like it, more fear is spread. And that fear will cost lives and almost certainly more lives than COVID19.
‘Black Lives Matter’ is scrawled on the banners at the head of this current tsunami of social unrest. For fear of creating another second wave of my own, can I respectfully point out that whilst “COVID Deaths Matter”, I am more of the view that “All Deaths Matter”.