Member-only story
“Opinions are like noses”
In today’s New York Times “Opinion Today” colum Editor Peter Catalan writes;
“Instead of worrying, I did statistical research on the odds of specific bad things happening. They became less scary. I put them in perspective. I was seeing things as they were, not as I believed them to be.”
Not that putting things, regarding the Coronavirus, in perspective will cause us to worry less but relying on data instead of opinion may allow us to approach the danger with a more realistic understanding of not only what is possible but what is likely to occur.
My wife’s grandfather who lived in the low-keyed community of Richie County WV would often say, “opinions are like noses, everybody’s got one” and that’s certainly true with regard to the Coronavirus. Opinions like “It shouldn’t be this hard getting COVID-19 vaccine into people’s arms.” ( https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-01-25/skelton-vaccines-california-covid-19-joe-biden-gavin-newsom") and “Becerra likens COVID-19 pandemic to ‘plane in a nose dive’” ( https://www.icloud.com/mail/ ) are clearly not of much more value than stating we all have a nose so don’t breathe around people infected with the virus. Of much more value might be looking at simple charts like the following to understand what…
