Math continues to confound the media, not to mention our neighbors

I read today that a recent Colorado study concludes that if a person has been "boosted," that person is about 50 times LESS likely to be hospitalized with any form of the virus compared to an unvaccinated neighbor.

It sounds impressive while also being nearly incomprehensible. Multiplying normally indicates increases in quantity. "My new job doubled my income" seems more natural than "My new job makes me two times less poor." When journalists decide to go with a multiplier to signify something LESS we run into all sorts of trouble, and it all begins with where the comparison starts.

For instance, here it seems more persuasive to choose the flipside of that "50 times less" statement: An unvaccinated Coloradan is 50 times MORE likely to be hospitalized than a neighbor who has had a booster vaccine.

Even that doesn't provide a full picture, since that starting point is still undefined. I was thinking that if the chance of a boosted adult being hospitalized due to the virus is already very small (like 1 in 9,000). Fifty times that takes us to 50 out of 9,000 people, and that is still quite a small chance. Yes, it's a lot more but the overall chances are far less than what we risk in other behaviors.

Your chances of getting into a car accident during a 1,000-mile trip are 1 in 366, just as an illustration. The estimate is that Americans average 3-4 accidents (and most are not life-threatening) over a lifetime of driving. Those are much higher odds than the chances of being hospitalized with Covid, but most of us ignore the danger in favor of our mobility. In a sense, we have factored the danger into our daily lives and decided (quite logically) that the positives we get from driving our cars outweighs the negatives.

The data also reveal that the population group most at risk of being hospitalized due to Covid, whether vaccinated or not, is still the elderly -- and I mean past the early 70s... like 85-year-olds). Of course, obesity and asthma and other underlying conditions cause the odds to get much worse.

It is also apparent that no data, no odds, and no scientific advice will suffice to change our behaviors as a nation and world. Emotions are so much more powerful than a mere exchange of facts.

But journalists continue to try to report on those facts, though almost always without the clarity we need as readers and viewers to make sense of trends.

It's the same basic issue as we find in reporting on federal budgets and new spending and new tax income, etc. The raw numbers are huge and the human mind can't really grasp numbers in the millions, not to mention the trillions.

We lost our ability as a nation to grapple with all sorts of issues once we surrendered to tribal politics, to such an extent that we now have people in America who would rather die than NOT "own the libs." 

Think about that. Some of our neighbors prefer the (admittedly slim) chance of death to compromising or (gasp!) changing their minds and adding one more vaccine to the inoculations they have already received.

More exasperating is the fact that Trump and most high-ranking Republicans are fully vaccinated, though they don't make a public sharing of that status very often. They benefit from the unrest, at least in the short term.

The ignorant and misinformed and fanatical do the dying, as always.