Still Free

Yeah, Mr. Smiley. Made it through the entire Trump presidency without being enslaved. Imagine that.

Saturday, October 03, 2020

Was My Math Dead On?

 So I saw some readers going back to older posts on Wuhan and I decided to look at my math post in which I made a mathematical argument for how many deaths we would see. I said:


I did some math against these numbers and found the following:

1) The Mean is: 1116 deaths.
The Standard Deviation is: 1262
The Margin of Error is: 420.5
Variance: 1,592,094

As you can see only China and Italy has deaths above the mean and 2 Standard Deviations from the mean. Mathematically we would consider these two cases to be outlier data that is to be considered suspect. Similarly Germany and South Korea would be considered outliers even though they are well within 1SD of the mean. The math suggests that Spain, France and Iran may be the most likely outcome. Realize with a variance as high as 1.6 million we could still see "large" numbers of deaths. I put large in quotes because next to the world population of 7.8 billion, 1.6 million is not all that much. That may sound cold but that's the numbers.

Well as of this writing, according to worldometers there have been 1,037,517 deaths as of today.



As you can see from the graph below. deaths are growing by 250K every 1.6 months. With three months left in the year that means an expected total mortality for the year of ~1,400,000 which is within the variance I calculated back in March. Assuming that things don't change, you should ask yourself why a blogger who is not an epidemiologist or any other medical expert could calculate, within 200k deaths the total number of worldwide deaths from Wuhan? Also, why did so many experts from "prestigious" institutions get it wrong and continue to get it wrong?

I'd also like to point out that this is not even accounting for the issue of dying with COVID and from COVID.  That is, if you were on deaths door and COVID was the last kick, I don't consider you a COVID death. However; if you were otherwise healthy and died of COVID, I DO consider you a COVID death.  Also, if you have say Diabetes and are obese but otherwise "healthy" and contracted COVID and died, I'd consider that a COVID death since you weren't waltzing with The Reaper, though you may have scheduled an appointment. This is not how deaths are being recorded so keep that in mind.

Well I'd like to think it's because I play BlackJack to win money. To do so I must be familiar with the math of the game. Not playing by the math literally costs me money. There may be at least one reader who knows when I was losing money so they know how devastating to the bankroll that can be. Since I cannot rely on magical thinking, wishing, Indian Buddahs, lucky charms, rubbing screens, lucky rabbits feet or other things to make my money (currently $20/hour), I must calculate my game and play as calculated. Too many of the people who are selling you bad info do not have to literally worry about being wrong and losing all their money and livelihoods.

Perhaps the CDC and WHO ought to hire some professional gamblers to do their statistics.