I think people tend to cherry pick what they want to see, to confirm their biases, she said.

She has been hesitant to place much stock in statistics on deaths caused by coronavirus, for instance. I see a lot of use of the fatality statistics, which are incomplete, Dr. Smith said. You do have deaths from coronavirus, but we know those are undercounted. For me, at least, that is not a particularly useful metric. But those are the type of statistics that some people grab onto.

Perhaps the most telling numbers are trend data examining which direction a community or state seems to be heading, said Michael T. Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesotas Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy.

Theres no magic number for any of this, Dr. Osterholm said. This is more like a windshield where youre looking at everything in front of you. Its not one piece of data. Its all of it coming together.

In 1918, newspapers in cities across the United States published daily tallies of the sick and the dead from the flu pandemic, said John M. Barry, the author of The Great Influenza, and public health officials made policy decisions accordingly, based on the data.

Todays elected officials have far more granular data to consider.

In Chicago, Dr. Arwady, the city health commissioner, has a call with Mayor Lori Lightfoot every morning, discussing the citys total cases, deaths, the seven-day average for testing and detailed hospitalization numbers, among other metrics.

Data to me is one of the best ways to make it real for people, Dr. Arwady said. She often tries to steer Chicagoans to look at coronavirus numbers broken down by ZIP code, so that they understand the risk they face in their own neighborhoods. Mostly, I want people to feel like Covid is in their lives.

Read more from the original source:

Hoping to Understand the Virus, Everyone Is Parsing a Mountain of Data - The New York Times