Covid -19 the lying of statistics a look at reality

I used to believe in 'education permanent', I had a broad interest and decided to study Historical Literature. That has been one of the best decisions of my life, apart from retiring early and becoming a vintner which happened 22 years ago. Historical literature increases one's level of abstraction, you can only make contact with an author or his or her ideas through texts that were written in the distant past.

My professor in those days always said, "Pose the right questions to the text and you will get the right answers." To find out the 'truth' of a zeitgeist, you have to formulate the right questions. Nothing is white or black or a hue of colors in between, everything depends on the message and its interpretation.

It is a game of moving into a reality as you suspect it was present and testing whether that assumption is correct through research.

Historical literature in a technocratic society finds its importance in academia and in education. Society is not waiting for citizens who can place 10th or 14th century writings in a narrow contemporary framework. It is simply extremely important for your own development and it is a selfish interest that you serve with it.

I found a job in education and in the evening I studied history, which had nice overlap with my historical literature interest.

To make a long story short, my last study was economics in which I obtained my PhD when I was 45 years old on mathematical models and budgeting systems.

With the last study you could simply choose the jobs. The technocratic society has an enormous interest in guiding or adjusting its business projects.

A learning moment for me was when a professor pointed me to a book about statistics: 'the lying of statistics' written in 1954, and a second work called 'wishes, lies and dreams'. The latter book was about teaching children to write poetry. It was about the creative mind and interpreting a reality and capturing it in words that were concise in nature.

I had a nice professor who was very open-minded, this professor became my supervisor and helped me to shape my thesis and shared the fact that he had always believed in the principle of education permanent but had become tired of fighting against the crowd of young people who took classes without interest just to get 'credits' and he addressed only those who were truly interested.

So we have all ended up in the era of the Covid-19 virus. The name in itself is already a veil. Tedros Adhonom, president of the World Health Organization, suggested from the very beginning to adopt that name and not something that could reflect on a country, not the Chinese virus, although we all know that it comes from there but something that does not cause dissatisfaction with countries or territories.

From the beginning we saw that the 'wishes, lies and dreams' mechanism was put into operation. Politicians who were unprepared (who would have been prepared anyway) downplayed the cases and came up with delusional ideas about group immunity. They merely repeated what 'experts' (who is an expert when something new comes along) whispered to them. Their wish was to avoid panic and quickly get a serum or a vaccine.

Now we know that group immunity has been a ridiculous assumption. If one has been infected with the Chinese virus, (sorry could not resist .. Covid-19), one can still get side effects after years. Clumps of blood in the brain stream resulting in strokes and failure symptoms, damage to the heart or other vital organs. The vaccine is not going to appear soon and like the famous donkey with the carrot in front of his nose, hanging from a fishing rod, we are being coached into a reality that can be called surreal and time is being stretched in the hope that a solution will appear.

There are no solutions, there is no cure, at the most your gasping for breath can be relieved a bit by lying upside down on a bed, in a coma, with an oxygen tube in your throat.

Those are horror scenarios, that's all there is to it. Intensive care means that you are ventilated and that is it and then see if you get out and how and what the later side effects are.

So we have politics on the one hand and the well-being of the citizens and the economy on the other. The political leaders want to appear decisive, they do not want to be tapped off for inability, and in the balance lie health and / or the economy.

I live in Spain and it is bad in Spain, it is the worst in the entire European Union. To date, we have had 543 379 cases and 8866 have been added in the last 24 hours. More than half a million cases and the growth is almost exponential. Our figures are provided with a delay and I have found that they differ from reality. In Spain there is invariably a difference of 50 thousand or 40 000 plus difference, between the figures presented by the government and the United Nations Geoscheme.

That is quite a difference and then the reality may be even worse. The United Nations Geoscheme shapes the Worlometer Covid-19 database. The registration of the World Health organization.

That is the database that I use. I realize that much depends on how countries register, for example: is something only registered if one has taken a test and then dies? Or does the determination of the symptoms count? Then you can end up in polluted statistics.



I am interested in countries around Spain and as I also have property and family in Canada and daughters who live in the Netherlands and Belgium, I follow those statistics closely.

Because of what politics presents, you can no longer see the wood for the trees, and perhaps that was intended by politics.

Spain is a tourist country by far, so are Italy and Portugal, moreover, they enjoy approximately the same climate. You have to be able to compare things there. Not all countries have performed the same amount of tests and not all populations are the same. Portugal is the smallest of the three in terms of population. Therefore, you have to look at a few factors.

I have looked at many numbers and decided to plot the population against the number of cases and compare that with the number of tests. I have decided to arrive at an expression of reason. For example, like a car drives 10 miles to a gallon, I want to find a method to express how many cases per capita population, so if for example in the Us the ratio is 1 in 51, it would mean that 1 in 51 is infected (this was just an example ).

As of today 10-9 2020, the number of cases for Spain is 543 379 according to the Worldometer updated every 24 hours at midnight (0 hours) GMT in a statistic that keeps track of 213 countries.

Spain has 543 379 .. population. 46 758 325 .. tested 9 987 326 .. died 29 628

Portugal 61 541 .. population 10 190 843 ... tested 2 186 824 ... died 1849

Italy 281 583 .. population 60 444 341 .. tested 9 460 203 .. died 35 577

If we divide the population of Spain by the number of cases, we arrive at a ratio of 1 in 86

If we divide the population of Portugal by the number of cases, we arrive at a ratio of 1 in 156

If we divide the population of Italy by the number of cases we arrive at a ratio of

1 in 214

We see a number of things in these three comparisons. Spain is the worst and Italy tests less compared to Spain, but Portugal has a worse ratio than Italy.

San Daniel 2020

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