BRIEFING: The 2022 edition of the British Polling Council’s “Opinion Polls: Guidance for Journalists” is available here britishpollingcouncil.org/opinion-polls-…

Anthony B. Masters gave a fine talk on Irish Covid data anthonybmasters.medium.com/the-challenges…

🆕 27 April

That is now TEN times the Prime Minister has made the same false employment claim in Parliament.

📡New statistics, such as pandemic figures, can be hard to communicate.
🔢Numbers need to be set in context, such as against the past or expectations.
🪗There is often limited space for explaining caveats with these stats.
anthonybmasters.medium.com/the-challenges…

Dr Anthony Masters Anthony B. Masters, co-author of Covid By Numbers: Making Sense of the Pandemic With Data, talking about the challenges of communicating COVID-19 statistics

🗂️The Google card for Covid-19 surveillance deaths shows an incorrect rolling average.
⚠️It is better to look at that count by date of death.
🥧A pie chart in The Times put the win percentage (as a round number) alongside matches played, won, and lost.
anthonybmasters.medium.com/bad-graph-hunt…

📈A graph attributed to Morgan Stanley shows linear smoothing over a clear discontinuity.
🍎New York had missing values for ICU patients, which the analysis treated as zero.
🛤️Some stats were difficult for volunteers in the tracker project to get.
anthonybmasters.medium.com/the-case-of-th…

As the Commons debate whether the Prime Minister should be investigated for misleading Parliament, a reminder that Boris Johnson has got the same employment claim wrong in the House nine times now.

fullfact.org/economy/boris-…

🧪Free SARS-CoV-2 tests are ending at different times in the UK.
📉Testing eligibility and capacity affects confirmed case counts.
🌊There is a parting of the waves. Random testing maintains high estimates for positive rates.
anthonybmasters.medium.com/parting-of-the…

⚖️Age-standardised mortality is a weighted average of mortality in different age groups.
🔼Relative age-standardised mortality shows the change against a baseline value.
🧑‍💻I show the code for making a graph of relative mortality in European countries.
anthonybmasters.medium.com/relative-age-s…

The Royal Statistical Society hosted an event about communication in the pandemic.
❓How well have analysts shown uncertainty?
📊There are different ways to show uncertainty, including graphs.
📶There is good practice, but it is inconsistent.
anthonybmasters.medium.com/uncertainty-an…

The #WorldCup2022 draw puts teams into eight groups.
➡️The FIFA sequential method does not give equal chance to all valid outcomes.
🧮Sequential drawing by pots, with a fixed host, induces distortions.
🥉Two professors suggest three alternate ways.
anthonybmasters.medium.com/world-cup-draw…

In England, the estimated number of people testing positive for #COVID19 increased to a record level (week ending 26 March 2022).

Around 1 in 13 people, not in care homes, hospitals or other institutional settings would have tested positive for COVID-19 ow.ly/bnqt50Iy3FP

Latest issue of Significance is out - free to read for a little while, including my piece on Covid Communicators - rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.11…

📉Death counts in Australia increase, whilst mortality rates decline.
😷Compared to 2020, mortality rates due to respiratory illness were higher in 2021.
🔍Mortality needs measured examination.
anthonybmasters.medium.com/standardised-m…

'When using any figures, it is important that sufficient context is given to enable appropriate interpretation of the figures being quoted.' osr.statisticsauthority.gov.uk/news/osr-state…

🥅The goal of Bayesian analyses is to get the posterior distribution.
📊Since surveys estimate shares, the Dirichlet distribution is appropriate.
🆙There is a simple updating rule, adding the 'prior' and 'data' values.
anthonybmasters.medium.com/a-simple-bayes…

⌛️Registered deaths of those aged 15-29 were lower in 2020 and higher in 2021.
🪙This may be two sides of the same coin, due to registration delays.
📅By year of death, there were about 90 fewer deaths of young people in 2020 than the 2015-19 average.
anthonybmasters.medium.com/young-mortalit…

'Whether they have realized it or not, people around the world have essentially been enrolled in a two-year mathematics course... COVID-19 dashboards were vehicles for this public education.'
nature
nature.com/articles/d4158…