COVID-19, Number Blindness, and the Monolithic Legacy Media

The Legacy Media isn't just innumerate, they're number-blind. We've seen a lot of examples this year.

Hell, this week.

One was the recent debacle of some poor woman who posted that Bloomberg had spent $500 million on ads, and so could have just given the 327 million Americans a million dollars.

I don't want to call down more derision on her — she's changed her Twitter profile to "I'm not good at math" and protected her tweets — you all leave her alone — but I am going to call down more derision on Brian Williams and Mara Gay because they are supposed to be smart news sources and everything. (Treacher did a good job of that too, although I do think he's only the second-least influential blogger. But I think Williams and Gay deserve more and I'm trying to make a point.)

So here's the deal, a literal back-of-an-envelope calculation:

Okay, strictly it's the back of an index card. I couldn't find an envelope.

This is literally fourth-grade arithmetic: you cancel out the millions and it's 500/327 and that's 1.5290519, close enough. I don't expect news people to see that down to eight significant figures — god knows I used a calculator — but I do imagine that they'd see, pretty intuitively, that 500/327 would be closer to one and a half than one million.

I suppose you could put it down to innumeracy, but I think it's not that complicated. I think they literally don't think about numbers at all. They didn't see that it was silly because it never runs through their heads.

And if one makes that assumption for CV, one must also make that assumption for the flu. We don’t count flu cases which the afflicted never noticed or was not bothered enough to do anything about, so counting them or padding the numbers with some arbitrary number of extra cases of CV is simply deceitful. So it is a wash, really, but I suppose it gives some people hope to think those mild cases are out there.

Bottom line, as far as we can tell, the Wuhan virus is significantly more lethal than the flu, so containing it is the first line of defense while we develop countermeasures. Containment slows the spread, giving us more time to develop those countermeasures and limiting the burden on our health care system so we don’t see collapses like in Wuhan, Iran and now Italy.

Containment is key.

Containment is key.

Good luck with that in today's USA. The twits in Missouri showed how important it is to them.

About 1900, some of my ancestors and their family were quarantined in a small southern Iowa town for a couple weeks with scarlet fever. Their house was placarded and food left on the steps. How did they react? They stood it, and stood it despite being a hell-raising, don't-take-crap-from-anyone bunch. That America is tough to find.

A missing point in the whole Williams/Gay fiasco is that Williams and Gay actually believe that a single rich man could make EVERY MAN, WOMAN, AND CHILD in the US millionaires, by simply giving away just 3 percent of his wealth to them. In fact, the US government could confiscate ALL of his wealth, and it would not produce even a noticeable dent in the US spending debt.

Yes, the US media is really that much out of touch with reality!.

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