Remember the presidential polls in 2016, projecting landslide victory for Hillary Clinton to the very end? How could they have been so wrong?
The thing about polls is, you have to poll the right people. Poll the general population about candidate preferences and the results will be worthless. Poll registered voters and you’ll do better. Poll likely voters, you’ll do better still. Even then, you’ll have to take into consideration whether or not poll participants are giving honest answers.
Thanks to media demonization of Trump, many likely voters declined to acknowledge support for him, or risk reprisals for yard signs and bumper stickers.
Prognostications about COVID-19 have suffered from similar misrepresentations.
In a guest editorial published in the Record this week, attorney James Craney, a former researcher and statistical data analyst, expressed “grave concerns about the numbers that the State of Illinois (and other states) are using to make decisions about closing down large facets of our economy. The so-called ‘positivity rate,’ doesn’t tell us the full story about what is happening in the community with this disease,” he claimed.
“As a quick example, if 100 people are tested for COVID-19 right now, it is extremely likely that they are being tested because they are sick, or because they have recently been in close contact with someone who has tested positive,” Craney explained. “So of course the percent with a positive result can be higher than in the general population. In science, this is called ‘selection bias,’ or ‘ascertainment bias.’”
Craney concludes that “relying only on one, skewed measurement like the ‘positivity rate’ is a critical error when making decisions to shut down large portions of our economy. This is especially true when the number of positive folks who actually have symptoms is lower than with many other diseases. Estimates are that as much as 45% of positive cases are asymptomatic, meaning they aren’t sick.”
What is sick is shutting down our economy and browbeating citizens into mask-wearing submission because of a virus with a survival rate of 99+ percent. Enough already.