We’ve all seen it, from every news source. Gleeful accounts of the day’s new high score. The lead articles on all the legacy media sites, whether TV, online or print, are all about big scary numbers. ‘20,000 dead in America’, ‘Highest Roadtoll for a Decade’, ‘Coronavirus Cases Over One Thousand’.
That’s what gets clicks of course, and as we’re the clickers, it seems that our appetite for big numbers is what drives this. If the article headline said something like ‘Bugger All to Report Today’, we probably wouldn’t bother checking it out.
So maybe this is why the government is only giving us the big numbers. It helps to justify their (sorry I mean Jacinda’s) decision to have us all locked up, with fewer rights than criminals subject to Home Detention. At least those guys can usually go out during the day.
Let’s look at some of the numbers then. I will use the figures revealed on Sunday the 19th.
You will note the top number, the one you might notice first, is the number of confirmed cases. 1098, a big scary number. Followed by the ‘probable’ number of 333. These are then added together to make the biggest scariest number of 1431, conveniently highlighted in bold to look extra scary.
By now you should all be a-twitter, secure in the reasoning behind your fear, happy to have the ‘experts’ making all your decisions for you, and happy to stay locked up like a common criminal, meekly kowtowing to the Commissariat, safe in the knowledge that ‘Dear Leader’ Jacinda Ardern has your back and is being kind to you.
From there on the numbers get a bit boring, nothing to see here, move along, please. Hang on a minute. 18 in Hospital? Seriously? I thought the whole point of flattening the curve was to allow the hospitals to cope. My little hospital in Queenstown could cope with that!
What’s next? Another big number, but by now you should have given up and stopped looking as numbers down this far really shouldn’t be of concern for you. 912 recovered, meh, it doesn’t matter how many people have already gotten over their minor symptoms, it’s the big scary totals that you’re supposed to concentrate on.
And last of all, the smallest number of the day, and because the number is so small, it is popped way down the bottom of the list. 12 people dead. Seriously folks, you probably shouldn’t even be reading such a small number; please remember our ‘models’ have predicted a really big scary number so please just concentrate on that. How about you just remember a big number instead, how about 80,000 dead. That’s how many lives we’re saving, remember.
Now those of you who partake in a little Backchat of an evening may have noticed a very fine graph from a clever commenter known as KCL52. This graph shows not only the big scary number of Total Confirmed Cases in red, but also the Total Recovered Cases in green, and most importantly the Net Current cases, in blue.
You may note that only actual confirmed cases are shown in red. This I believe is due to the belief by KCL52 that if the Ministry of Health can’t be arsed to actually test those they think ‘probably’ have the virus, then he can’t be arsed including what is essentially just a guess. Quite why they won’t test people who they actually think have the WuPox is beyond me.
Anyway, note how low the blue line is. I have done the numbers for today (Friday the 19th). It comes out at 186 actual, confirmed active cases of this virus, for the entire country. Even if you added the ‘Might Haves’, we still only have 519. Seriously, we’re sending everyone broke and demented for that?
There are other nice graphs on the government site too though. How about this pretty coloured one of Total Cases by DHB, (District Health Board).
Let’s look at the Southern DHB stats. Two reasons for this, I live there for one, and the number is right up the top and the line is longest so it must be the worst. It also has a big number at the start, 216, and that is higher than all the other numbers so we must be the worst.
Now first of all, Southern DHB is a really big place. It runs from about Mt Cook all the way down to Stewart Island. It includes quite a few towns and even two cities. In it you will find Alexandra, Cromwell, Dunedin, Gore, Invercargill, Queenstown, Wanaka and a whole host of lovely little towns like where you might find your moderator Greg M holed up in his caravan supping quietly on a G and T. There’s even a couple of less desirable places like Whitecaps and Tuatapere but we don’t like to talk about them. Apparently 334,300 souls live down this way, not to mention all the tourists.
So what does this graph tell us? Southern has had a big number of infections. It now currently only has 62. That’s quite a small number for such a big place, and if you take out the ‘might haves’, that number is really starting to get barely visible. Certainly not enough to fill one of the new open-plan classrooms at Wakatipu High.
Then I look at the Total Cases in the Hospital table on the government website. Ooh, look, somewhere in one of our many hospitals down here in the lower half of the South, we have the grand total of ONE person in the hospital! Wow, I wonder if the system will cope?
Funny though, if I go to the Current Cases Details page, I find that for the Southern DHB region, we don’t seem to have many cases that are current. Our last notified case was on the 15th of April just a few days ago, a 15 to 19-year-old teenage girl. Prior to that was a twenty-something female and a thirty-something male who were notified on the 9th April.
That’s eleven days ago. The recovered criteria above in the first graph states “Recovered cases are people who had the virus, are at least 10 days since onset and have not exhibited symptoms for 48 hours, and have been cleared by the health professional responsible for their monitoring.“
Oh well, maybe they just haven’t been cleared by their doctors yet. In any case, the rest of those confirmed cases are older than that so in reality, it looks like Southern only has a handful of cases in total that are actually still an active problem. And here’s the kicker, we know who they all are, and where they live (not that us plebs get told unimportant things like what town or suburb they should avoid). All those people can have their contacts traced, they can be managed and kept away from old people and the infirm.
So again, we are all being bludgeoned with kindness. Many of us will go bankrupt, some will kill themselves, at least one Airbnb host in Queenstown has done just that last week, all so Ardern can say she knew what was best for us.
Beware the big numbers, they are a lie, a trick, they are designed to scare you, to make you willingly submit.
I don’t care anymore that the government pretend they went ‘Hardernurly‘, I don’t even care that they locked me up when I hadn’t done anything wrong. They can make the claim that we are only in this position because of their actions, it doesn’t matter any more, good for them, well done, clap clap. It doesn’t matter anymore that the initial modelling was rubbish. Maybe it was the government’s actions, maybe we just have unique circumstances, maybe we just got lucky, maybe Jacinda really is God’s gift to all that is righteous and good.
I don’t care any more, just allow us to get on with saving our livelihoods, our sanity, our lives. And don’t even think about putting us into level 3, or 3.8 with KFC, or even bloody level 2.
Just call the whole damn thing off and let’s get back to being the best damn place in the world to live.