There are lies, damned lies and statistics — and never more so than during a pandemic in an era of fake news. The graphs, league tables and bar charts that have proliferated throughout the coronavirus crisis can sometimes create more confusion than clarity. With their dubious testing targets and questionable spending pledges, politicians have too often used slippery statistics to obfuscate rather than illuminate. Sir David Spiegelhalter, a professor in the Statistical Laboratory at Cambridge, is the man who can nail down the numbers and cut through the spin. “Statistics do not speak for themselves, they can be made to look in many different ways,” he tells us via Zoom from his study.

Source: The Times September 11, 2020 23:05 UTC