Ty @statnews. I fretted over this one. Should we ask @CDCgov to consider what people will understand when they make announcements, particularly when a technical measure is so far off when judged against its plain language meaning? I think sohttps://www.statnews.com/2021/02/25/cdc-one-year-decline-life-expectancy-really-five-days/ …
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Replying to @peterbachmd @nicholas_bagley and
Social demographer here: Life expectancy is a simulated measure that is powerful for understanding mortality in & across populations in a year. You can criticize communication about it but not how CDC calculated it. Pop health scientists like me need/use this information.
2 replies 6 retweets 48 likes -
Replying to @paulalantz @nicholas_bagley and
Hi, country doctor living in the big city here. I actually covered this issue in detail in my column, but this concerns me. Did I bungle the explanation (that would be more than a little ironic). E.g. I wrote "It’s not that the agency made a math mistake. "
1 reply 1 retweet 10 likes -
Replying to @peterbachmd @nicholas_bagley and
You wrote that CDC "calculated life expectancy using an assumption that is assuredly wrong" and called it a misstep. LE calculations have well-defined methods--different from assumptions. It is not a stat to be used to project individual LE. It is a population-level stat.
1 reply 2 retweets 32 likes -
Replying to @paulalantz @nicholas_bagley and
We might disagree. PLE is communicated to the public & understood implicitly as a forecast of CLE. That link depends on steady mortality risk stability. Otherwise PLE is just some compound death rate stat that lacks interpretation, in which case why broadcast it so broadly?
1 reply 1 retweet 8 likes -
Replying to @peterbachmd @nicholas_bagley and
I agree with you 100% that communication about LE needs to be better! This communication should include what it is, what it reveals and why it is a powerful/useful--not misleading or erroneous- indicator of what is happening in a moment in a population's health.
2 replies 1 retweet 17 likes -
Replying to @paulalantz @nicholas_bagley and
Why aren’t other measures better for this purpose? Lives lost. Yrs lost. Premature & Excess deaths. Ranking in causes of death. Those all are of the moment, in this case appallingly awful, and do not convey any long projection that out of the box is clearly an overestimate.
4 replies 1 retweet 13 likes
Using a different measure is fine, calling it "life expectancy" is an obvious mistake, and the headline is quite clearly wrong @statnews
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