Numbers and Statistics: Understanding the Coronavirus Pandemic

Worldwide discussions bring clarity, but often not answers, to questions about the COVID-19 pandemic, because investigations are removed from the political debates within any single nation. As calmer investigations, not overheated by regional politics, proceed, it is clear that one key word is “estimation,” indicating that numbers presented about the virus are not definite, but rather merely preliminary.

Into nearly every sentence written or spoken about the Coronavirus, the adverbs “probably” or “approximately” should be inserted, if they are not already present. The phrase “on average” should also be added.

It is perhaps excusable, but nonetheless wrong, to see any number as indicating a precise value. In the case of a virus, the existence of which was not known as recently as a year ago, any number must be seen as an educated guess.

When the pandemic first gained the attention of the world in March 2020, several months after low-level media reporting and a bit of biological research had begun, any numbers used in reporting about the virus were vague and often off-target by an order of magnitude, as this November 2020 newspaper text from Michigan suggests:

When on March 10 the state announced its first two cases, 532 people already were sick with what was later confirmed to be coronavirus.

The real number was many times that. University of California Berkeley researchers have estimated for every confirmed case in the spring, Michigan had 12 undetected cases.

The testing mechanisms for the virus were hastily-developed. Significant numbers of false positives and false negatives were present but often ignored in the summary conclusions drawn from the crude data.

In urban areas, the concern is cases going undetected because people can have coronavirus and not realize it. University of Michigan epidemiologist Ryan Malosh cited estimates of “three to six missed cases” for every one confirmed.

Further ambiguity affected the numbers as the precise percentage of asymptomatic, or mildly symptomatic, cases was unknown. Every estimate of that percentage seemed to be higher than the last, but remained a mere guess.

Pathologists in Germany, for example, argued about how many people died from COVID-19. Of those patients whose death certificates indicated Coronavirus as the cause of death, some researchers guessed that as many as 85% of them died of that cause. Other researchers indicated that fewer than 50% died from COVID-19.

The ordinary newspaper-reading citizen is left bewildered. If major research universities can’t sort this out, who can? The fact remains that many questions about the pandemic remain unanswered, and will likely remain so for several years.