Out of the woods?

The death rate has finally sunk below the first peak, back in April 2020, having been well above it for large chunks of the subsequent two years. But with there still being strong contributions from the European Union, the rest of Europe, the US and the rest of Asia. Which last I take to be east Asia, excluding India and the Russian far east.

One fly in the ointment is the irritatingly triumphalist tone of the announcement that the UK is shortly to drop all travel restrictions. But that, I suppose, is what we must expect when our leader is a booster, a barker by nature. That is what we voted for.

A second fly in the ointment is that something seems to be wrong with my version of the FT graphic. A picture might well be worth a thousand words, but my eye is delivering misleading impressions from it, which is why I have taken to superimposing a Powerpoint rectangle on top of the raw graphic snipped from the FT. But in the last version, at reference 1, this line suggests that last autumn's lull was hovering around the level of that first peak. While in this latest version, it looks comfortably below.

Now in the real graphic in the FT, there is animation: if you mouse over a point on the graphic you get a white pop-up telling you what the daily total is at that point. According to which last autumn's lull was indeed hovering around the level of the first peak. 

All of which suggests that some distortion might be creeping in, somewhere along the long sequence of graphics processes between the FT graphic artist and yours truly. The Powerpoint horizontals do not seem to be giving a true and fair view of the facts on the grounds. 

And on the assumption that the graphic is produced by a computer from the raw numbers, it seems unlikely that that first graphic is not a true and fair view of the numbers. A further complication might be that these numbers are subject to revision over time, as so many statistics from official sources are. In which case, at least, the officials do recognise their own limitations. But this does not help with the present difficulty, as the Powerpoint horizontals above, don't seem to agree with the white pop-ups in today's FT.

And placing a ruler directly on the screen of the laptop, I get the same story.

Further investigation needed. In any event, a reminder of the expense and difficulty of getting statistics right.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/02/not-out-of-woods-yet.html.

Group search key: FT, graphic.