Math News — Worldometer
You know when the Coronavirus first started, I got a kick out of pouring over the numbers. It was very morbid, because the numbers were the number of deaths from Coronavirus. This is back when it was still a novelty, working from home and all. I had a whiteboard, so I started making little graphs showing Coronavirus deaths plotted over time in variosu regions.
I still have pics of that whiteboard that I posted on my now-deactivated Instagram. I did some just showing maybe the four most-affected countries; then it was the ten most effected countries. Then it was the ten most effected states. This was all back when the total deaths was a snippet of what they are now; and yet I did track it as it was spiking.
It felt like I was doing a service because although I was merely reprinting information that was freely available elsewhere, anyone (like myself) can choose how to present that information; can choose which parts to emphasize, can try to remove a lot of what appears to be needless detail. Just by rounding where I chose to round, just by deciding what countries to include, I could paint what I fetl was the clearest picture. A lot of times the information you get in certain places isn’t as clean as you’d like it to be.
I have a hard time claiming though that I was really adding any value. The fact that I copied down so many numbers mostly speaks to a strange fascination I have with numbers. I got my numbers from the WHO website, where a daily report was released each day around noon, with numbers from every country in the whole world. So I would simply include the countreis with the highest numbers — that does seem/sound like adding value, just by highlighting the most important part I was saving others theoretically who might view my pics a lot of time; they wouldn’t need to look through a list of all countries in the world to see how things were going in the worst ones.
But then, other websites were doing this better than I was. I think the site that made me realize that I wasn’t adding much, that what I was doing was being done elsewhere, and much better there, was worldometer. At worldometers.info/coronavirus they have a list of all the countries in the world with their coronavirus numbers, and you can sort the list by any of a multitude of categories. Here’s the latest:
I actually recorded some videos where I would give commentary on a table like this, but at this point it’s all kind of talked out, isn’t it? Do people even talk about Corona anymore? Funny, actually — saying what I just said is disingenuous, since that itself is taking a position. It’s like saying, “I don’t follow politics.” Well, okay, maybe not, but now I know something about your politics, from you having said that.
And I really do want to spend less time following politics.
As for numbers, these days I have been getting my numbers reading fix more by following basketball, of which more later. I should/will keep an eye out for interesting numbers and tables and graphs to show here. And yeah — as far as being objective or subjective goes, well, it’s wonderfully objective to tell stories with numbers. You don’t say how this is good or this is bad but rather there are three of these things. How can you argue with facts.
On the other hand, there is huge subjective bias in being able to choose which numbers to present. Above, I screen-shot the ten worst countries in the world according to Deaths per million in the population. The U.S. is tenth on that list. There’s a lot of context missing — the fact that there are over 200 countries in the world on that full graph/table. I instead could have focused on states. Lots of possibilities … and the freedom in getting to choose what to include, well, that’s a writer’s joy.
That’s an interesting discovery — that there is a joy in being subjective. It’s like getting to put oneself into the story. Getting to make decisions about what gets included and what doesn’t, it is like being able to throw one’s weight around. I appreciate the objective voice, the use of facts to show a story without telling it — it’s all very artful. But truly, the writer does get to tell their story, don’t they?
