Why newspaper reporting of "statistics" is often goes wrong. This is about vaccines and their efficacy but it applies to other areas as well, like economics. But a lot of the abuse of statistics is in media headlines about health.
Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science
Coronavirus and Simpson’s paradox: Oldsters are more likely to be vaccinated and more likely to have severe infections, so you need to adjust for age when comparing vaccinated and unvaccinated people
Andrew Gelman | Professor of Statistics and Political Science and Director of the Applied Statistics Center, Columbia University
2 comments:
This is about vaccines and their efficacy but it applies to other areas as well,
Like this one:
The low birth-weight paradox is an apparently paradoxical observation relating to the birth weights and mortality rate of children born to tobacco smoking mothers. Low birth-weight children born to smoking mothers have a lower infant mortality rate than the low birth weight children of non-smokers. It is an example of Simpson's paradox.
Explanation
At first sight these findings seemed to suggest that, at least for some babies, having a smoking mother might be beneficial to one's health. However the paradox can be explained statistically by uncovering a lurking variable between smoking and the two key variables: birth weight and risk of mortality. Both variables are acted on independently by smoking and other adverse conditions — birth weight is lowered and the risk of mortality increases. However, each condition does not necessarily affect both variables to the same extent.
The birth weight distribution for children of smoking mothers is shifted to lower weights by their mothers' actions. Therefore, otherwise healthy babies (who would weigh more if it were not for the fact their mother smoked) are born underweight. However, they still have a lower mortality rate than children who have other, more severe, medical reasons why they are born underweight.
In short, smoking is harmful in that it contributes to low birth weight which has higher mortality than normal birth weight, but other causes of low birth weight are generally more harmful than smoking.
When adjusted for co-morbidity, Coronavirus itself kills almost no one.
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