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Misapplied statistics
It’s amazing after all the information out there on the coronavirus, people still don’t understand what is going on. Mr. (Jake) Nelson thinks we should open things up because there are so few deaths (“Take back your liberty,” April 23).
OK, but the reason there are so few is because we are shut down. Otherwise there would be thousands of cases and hundreds of deaths. And Mr. Miller gives us the math on the death rate, which I’m sure is good math, but entirely the wrong way to determine it. You compare the total deaths from COVID-19 to the total cases, not the total overall deaths from everything, which comes out to way more than 0.00015. Nineteen dead from over 330 cases is 0.057. And if we use Mr. Nelson’s 30 deaths, it’s nearly 10 percent, which is way more than the common flu.
Apparently more information and facts need to be put out there to clear up these misconceptions.
Doug Adams
Spokane Valley