“Raw Data” Is an Oxymoron

The Official Coronavirus Numbers Are Wrong, and Everyone Knows It

Because the U.S. data on coronavirus infections are so deeply flawed, the quantification of the outbreak obscures more than it illuminates.
Alexis C. Madrigal
1:32 PM

Meanwhile, South Korean officials have been testing more than 10,000 people a day, driving up the country’s reported-case count. Same goes for Italy: high test rate, high number of cases. (Now some Italian politicians want to restrict testing.) In China, the official data say the country has more than 80,000 cases, but the real number might be far, far higher because of all the people who had mild(er) cases and were turned away from medical care, or never sought it in the first place. That may be cause for reassurance (though not everyone agrees), because the total number of cases is the denominator in the simple equation that yields a fatality rate: deaths divided by cases. More cases with the same number of deaths means that the disease is likely less deadly than the data show.



The point is that every country’s numbers are the result of a specific set of testing and accounting regimes. Everyone is cooking the data, one way or anothe


People trust data. Numbers seem real. Charts have charismatic power. People believe what can be quantified. But data do not always accurately reflect the state of the world. Or as one scholar put it in a book title: “Raw Data” Is an Oxymoron.

　アメリカは検査数が少ないから感染数も少ないのは当たり前。中国だって、全部の感染数を把握しているわけではない。人間はデータや数、それに基づく表を信じやすいが、真実の世界を反映する生のデータなど存在せず、データはつねにすでに測定方法によって加工されたものなんだ、みたいな。