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cgseife's profile
Charles Seife
Charles Seife
Charles Seife
Verified account
@cgseife

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Charles SeifeVerified account

@cgseife

Journalist, author, NYU professor, debunker of 'alternative facts.' Author of new biography of Stephen Hawking. (Pronouns: he/him/his.)

New York City
charlesseife.com
Joined October 2008

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    Charles Seife‏Verified account @cgseife 7 May 2020

    In the age of big data, I can not BELIEVE how bad the COVID-19 statistics are. Pardon a brief twitter rant, but I 'm annoyed that it's amateur hour when it comes to pandemic data published by national and state public health authorities. /1

    9:22 AM - 7 May 2020
    • 32 Retweets
    • 89 Likes
    • Felipe Martins 🏳️‍🌈 Talal Zarif, MD Jason Benson Mike Stobbe AM Christie Aschwanden smchatter Mandy kevinmcld
    6 replies 32 retweets 89 likes
      1. New conversation
      2. Charles Seife‏Verified account @cgseife 7 May 2020

        To track the progress of the pandemic, you want to know, for example, how many people die each day. So, typically, every day, a public health authority will announce something like: there are 489 new COVID deaths today, May 1. On May 2, they announce 189. 138 on May 3. /2

        1 reply 3 retweets 8 likes
        Show this thread
      3. Charles Seife‏Verified account @cgseife 7 May 2020

        (These are Georgia's numbers.) Most everyone, Georgia included, puts these data down in their spreadsheet. May 1: 489 deaths. May 2: 189. May 3: 138. Graph these numbers, and they're a mess--all over the place--not truly representing disease dynamics. /3pic.twitter.com/uqERkASpTD

        2 replies 4 retweets 11 likes
        Show this thread
      4. Charles Seife‏Verified account @cgseife 7 May 2020

        If you're smart, you can smooth to get rid of some of the problems. If you're not (*cough* @whitehousecea ), you leave the raw data as is. Most public health agencies do something like this for their deaths-per-day graphs. However, these data are NOT in fact deaths per day! /4pic.twitter.com/1QXjImk6fe

        1 reply 4 retweets 12 likes
        Show this thread
      5. Charles Seife‏Verified account @cgseife 7 May 2020

        The data represent something rather different: not the people who died on a given date, but the number of deaths that came to the attention of the public health agency on a given date. It's a subtle, but important, distinction; deaths per day is not the same as "new" deaths. /5

        2 replies 3 retweets 17 likes
        Show this thread
      6. Charles Seife‏Verified account @cgseife 7 May 2020

        Each day, a public health authority becomes aware of new deaths; some died yesterday, some the day before, some the day before that, etc. So each new datum is partially new deaths, and partially old deaths--corrections to previous tabulations. /6

        1 reply 2 retweets 11 likes
        Show this thread
      7. Charles Seife‏Verified account @cgseife 7 May 2020

        The data we need is deaths per day, not deaths-that-came-to-the-authority's-attention per day. And the proper way to track deaths per day is to tally the newly tabulated deaths on the date on which the person died, not lump them together when the death was tallied. /7

        1 reply 9 retweets 24 likes
        Show this thread
      8. Charles Seife‏Verified account @cgseife 7 May 2020

        Day-of-death data is gold. Day-of-tabulation data is much less useful. (Here's a graph comparing the two in Sweden. The difference in quality is obvious.) But most authorities present the latter and not the former... /8pic.twitter.com/VeK48ZUp38

        1 reply 4 retweets 29 likes
        Show this thread
      9. Charles Seife‏Verified account @cgseife 7 May 2020

        And because it's easier to record new data than it is to go back and alter/correct old data, crappy day-of-tabulation data seems to be predominant over day-of-death data, even when the latter is available... which, in most cases, it seems not to be! /9

        1 reply 4 retweets 13 likes
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      10. Charles Seife‏Verified account @cgseife 7 May 2020

        To sum up: death counts presented by public health authorities aren't what they're purported to be, are much worse than data that analysts *actually* want, & which should be available but generally aren't. Then there are those darn data dashboards... maybe another time. :) /end

        2 replies 6 retweets 20 likes
        Show this thread
      11. End of conversation
      1. Who In Congress Helped the Insurrection Happen?‏ @JustitiaMatrona 7 May 2020
        Replying to @cgseife

        Thank you, for this thread. I'm 68. I thought that there was a lot of sloppiness going on, and your rant kind of confirmed it. Don't they teach exactitude, any more? You know, a reverence for accuracy and doing things the absolutely right way?

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