Don't be fooled, learn to read Covid-19 numbers yourself

The joke goes, 'There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics'. But it leads to a serious point that although numbers and data don’t lie, people can easily misuse them to do so. — 123rf.com

A mathematician, an engineer and a statistician walk into a bar. The bartender hands them a piece of paper with some writing on it and says, “Hey, can one of you solve this problem for me?”

The mathematician puzzles over it for a while and then says, “Well, I can tell you a solution exists but I can’t calculate the precise answer”.

The engineer then has a go at it. He says, “Well, depending on what kind of real world problem you are trying to solve, I could probably give you an approximate answer that’s good enough”.

Finally, the statistician takes over, and without even looking at the piece of paper, he asks, “What answer do you want it to be?”

Of course, this is just a joke, as is the famous phrase, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics”. But it leads to a serious point that although numbers and data don’t lie, people can easily misuse them to do so. Sometimes, they don’t even really need the numbers, they just need to vaguely point in the general direction.

Take a recent press release by a Malaysian pharmaceutical company that had the headline, “Research shows two doses of Sinovac Covid-19 with Pfizer booster less effective to fight against Omicron variant”. Now, you might read the title, skim through the press release and come to the conclusion that if you have two Sinovac doses, then a Pfizer booster is less effective than a Sinovac booster.

But that’s not actually what the press release says. It’s not even true.

As tweeted by Boo Su-Lyn, Editor-In-Chief of online health news portal CodeBlue, the pharmaceutical company “carefully avoids saying outright that a Sinovac booster offers more protection than a Pfizer booster”.

Prof Akiko Iwasaki, who is the author of the paper and a professor in the Department of Immunobiology as well as in the Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology at Yale University, tweeted that, “In terms of public health, CoronaVac 2x is insufficient to neutralise Omicron. Even with CoronaVac 2x plus Pfizer booster, NAb is only 1.4x higher than 2x mRNA alone. Thus, CoronaVac recipients may need 2 additional booster doses to reach levels needed against Omicron.” (The vaccine made by Sinovac is actually named CoronaVac. Professors like to be precise.)

To put it into Twitter auntie and uncle terms: Sinovac-Sinovac not good against Omicron. Sinovac-Sinovac-Pfizer is slightly better than Pfizer-Pfizer. People who took Sinovac might have to get two boosters.

But instead, the pharmaceutical company tried to imply that 2+2+1 was somehow less than 1+1+2.

The issue was so contentious that the Institute for Clinical Research, under the Malaysian Health Ministry, issued a press statement of its own that quite bluntly said that the pharmaceutical company’s statement was one where “the prevailing facts and evidence are misrepresented”.

On the one hand, we should be grateful that our government doctors seem to be willing to push back against those who misuse evidence-based medicine, even if they may include well-to-do businesses that made nearly RM50mil in profit in the third quarter of 2021.

This kind of steely resolve needs the support of the Health Minister, even after Malaysia allowed Sinovac as a booster option. “We still strongly recommend a Pfizer or AstraZenecca boost,” the minister said, “But something is better than nothing.”

It seems strange to see the Malaysian government encouraging people to take booster shots while other governments – mainly in Europe – are beginning to announce a rescindment of restrictions. Earlier this week, the British government announced that all Covid-19 regulations, including the requirement to isolate after testing positive, will be abolished in the United Kingdom. The current plan is to drop all remaining legal constraints on March 24.

The question is, will the UK reinstate the precautions if case numbers continue to rise? And if case numbers drop, will it encourage more relaxations?

Perhaps surprisingly, what some critics are worried about is that the UK will use the number of cases as the justification for its actions. Because if the number of positive cases goes down, everything should be great, right? Well, apart from dropping precautions, the British government is also looking to probably end almost all free PCR testing, and all free asymptomatic testing with lateral flow tests (what we call RTKs), to save money.

These cuts will also probably impact something called the Covid-19 infection survey run by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). It is regarded as the “gold standard” of Covid-19 measurements because they are tests run on a representative sample of the population, and have been run in the same households since June 2020.

Since the ONS survey will find positive cases in people who are otherwise asymptomatic and may not test themselves, it can identify cases beyond those admitted to hospital, or those that miss out on self-testing for one reason or another. The likelihood is that you will see a lowering in the number of cases – exactly what is needed for people to claim the UK is “returning to normal” – even though it’s the number of tests being done that is lowering.

Compare that with Malaysia. Some people here are worried that if the public only sees high case numbers, they may continue to be cautious, with continuing detrimental effects on the economy.

So the Health Ministry has announced some changes. But instead of trying to somehow reduce the number of positive test results we are getting, it will now only present case numbers together with all the other Covid-19-related data. “This is to reduce the fear factor and to educate society to look at the data more than just the daily cases,” says Health Minister Khairy Jamaluddin.

This strikes me as a laudable attempt to educate the public about how to interpret data, although I also notice it has not stopped conspiracy theorists from coming up with their own ideas. Still, I look forward to seeing how the ministry communicates this in the next few weeks.

Whatever the case, it will be interesting to see who steps to the front: doctor, businessman, or politician. And whoever takes the lead, I don’t really care, as long as the virus doesn’t thrive.

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In his fortnightly column, Contradictheory, mathematician-turned-scriptwriter Dzof Azmi explores the theory that logic is the antithesis of emotion but people need both to make sense of life’s vagaries and contradictions. Write to Dzof at [e-mail]. The views expressed here are entirely the writer's own.