[reasonisfaith]

So let’s be scientific about it.

How do we know what’s really true?

[RetiredScientist]

Good question. At some point we need to trust somebody or we can't analyze anything. Like all organizations, the WHO has biases. My take is that the cartographer was trying to show us that we need to watch to see how different visualizations can emphasize different aspects of the data and change the way we interpret the results. I spent a lot of time working with statisticians who tried to help us properly interpret complex data sets like this. Many in that communtiy run through the analysis themselves to see how different assumptions or models change the results. This is how modern science works, especially with Open Access data.

[RetiredScientist]

We will never have exhaustive information. The best we can do in this situation is to carefully examine the available data and draw the best conclusions we can. We draw tentative conclusions and test them as more data comes in. This is science in the era of large datasets describing complex problems.