There’s a common saying ,”the numbers don’t lie,” but is that true? Well, kinda. If you’re tracking stats consistently you’ve got an objective dataset that in an of itself doesn’t lie. But what you do with that data or how you arrive at that data can be manipulated in a way to tell the narrative that you’re wanting to tell. You can tell a story from true data that doesn’t hold as true when you look at it in a broader context.
Let’s look at an example with the current Covd-19 Pandemic. Here’s a Tweet from Andy Slavitt on May 2:
A couple points first. I don’t have the exact data sources that Mr. Slavitt was using for his numbers, so the exact daily count that I refer to in a moment won’t match. My sources were Worldometer for USA and the New York State Department of Health Covid-19 Tracker for New York . With that out of the way, let’s take a look at the Tweet and the data itself.