I’m not saying that a League Table of Misery has no value at all, I’m saying it has no value *now* for 4 main reasons: https://twitter.com/tiggles15/status/1248761728638296065

1. It feels like this has been going on forever but really we’re still at the beginning! The first death in the UK was only 38(?) days ago. The disease didn’t exist a few months ago. Pandemics happen in waves...

we don’t know what will happen when countries loosen restrictions. When supplies get even more scarce than they are now. Different countries are at different stages of the cycle. We are in this for the long haul. We won’t know who got it “right” until a vaccine is available.

2. The figures are cagey to say the least. This is effectively a league table of countries that are best at estimating how many people have died. In China and Russia, we will probably never know how many people really died, but they should be way further up.

Some large countries with non-centralised systems like India will struggle to coordinate and estimate. And most other countries are only routinely including deaths in hospitals, again bc of logistical reasons

(we saw big spikes in France and the UK when they added care home deaths - the US figure as big as it already is, is still not including those).

3. There’s also the debate of “died with corona” vs “died of corona” going on ... personally I think all countries should be including all deaths.

4. It’s frankly silly to compare Lombardy and London. There are so many factors EVEN if you adjusted per capita: healthcare system surge capacity, population density, demographics, culture, public transport, local production of healthcare products, economy, human rights, etc etc

The UK/Ireland are island nations, but comparing us with tiny (as in more sparsely populated) island nations is pointless. What e.g. NZ did seems to be working for now but frankly their challenge was never on the same scale & what happens when they try to go back to ‘normal’?

Due to all these factors, I think it renders the League Table effectively meaningless. What can we actually learn from it? Nothing. If you have more caveats than data, your data is junk.

Only in a year or so when we have more accurate figures can we compare countries and then we shouldn’t have a table, it should be like for like.

There is an if - IF there was an international coordination of efforts, which there should have been eg by the WHO then this data would be useful for something right now. But there isn’t - it’s every country for themselves and our data ought to reflect that.