Even more from that Politico.eu email.
About statistics. I hope the links remain live.
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Speaking of death stats: The FT’s daily graph of doom was published at 9.30 p.m. last night and shows the U.K. still steadily shadowing the death tolls in Italy and France. Vallance’s own version, published a few hours earlier (it’s the fourth slide in this series), was a little more positive, suggesting Britain and France are in fact well below Italy’s curve. As Playbook noted yesterday, the discrepancy appears to be based on where you start counting from. The government starts from the first day that 50 deaths were reported in each country, whereas the FT starts from 10.
The other issue with these comparisons … is that it’s unclear quite how accurate the comparative data is from around the world, even regarding the number of deaths. The U.K. will only be adding care home deaths today, for example, and with a significant time lag. There was speculation at the weekend that China has hugely under-reported the number of COVID-19 deaths. And writing in the Telegraph today, International Business Editor Ambrose Evans-Pritchard suggests Italy’s figures too may be wildly inaccurate. “The mayors of Bergamo and Brescia — two COVID-19 hotspots — say the reported deaths in their cities are a small fraction of the true numbers,” he notes.
But but but: These charts still provide an invaluable service, and if — like Playbook — you just can’t get enough of them, there’s another to add into the mix today. The Centre for Cities think tank has this morning launched a daily tracker of confirmed COVID-19 cases in towns and cities across the U.K. Its graph charts the number of cases per head of population in each urban center, and will be updated every afternoon. Interestingly it suggests Sheffield and Slough are currently second and third to London in terms of the scale of local outbreaks.
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