The Washington Post did a nice article last week on measuring the number of deaths related to the corona virus in the US. I learned about it from this tweet from Keith Devlin:
Today I had the boys read the article and we talked through several of the ideas they thought were interesting. Here are their initial thoughts and also their thoughts about how you would count the excess deaths from the graph shown in the cover pic from the article:
My younger son mentioned two ideas that caught his eye in the article – the difference between Republican / Democrat states and the difference in outcomes with large and medium lockdowns. We talked about those ideas here:
My older son had two things that he thought were interesting – the reporting delays and how the article counted the excess deaths vs the corona virus deaths:
Following those discussions we downloaded some data from the CDC’s website to see if we could match the Washington Post’s numbers. We could for Massachusetts, but were off by a bit for Indiana. Not sure why – the trouble of filming this stuff live – but the main ideas was just to show the boys how to check the numbers in articles like these (and why checking is important):
This was a fun project – I think the analysis of excess deaths is a helpful way to understand how bad the pandemic is. I’m glad the Washington Post published this article.
Mike's Math Page 