One of the perplexing things about the way President Trump uses numbers is the randomness. At times, he simply invents data, as with his repeated insistences that his approval among Republicans is at 96 percent. At others, he uses out-of-date or cherry-picked data to make his case. And sometimes it’s just a hodgepodge, numbers and comparisons picked seemingly at random, offered less as evidence of his thesis than as evidence-like tidbits meant to make his thesis seem more robust.
So we have this tweet, from Monday afternoon.
Why does the Lamestream Fake News Media REFUSE to say that China Virus deaths are down 39%, and that we now have the lowest Fatality (Mortality) Rate in the World. They just can’t stand that we are doing so well for our Country!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 6, 2020
Few have mastered the art of jamming more information into fewer characters than Trump, so we’ll set aside for now the “China Virus” elocution and the phrase “Lamestream Fake News Media” beyond to say that each is formatted in the same way: a noun modified by pejoratives. Let’s instead consider the evidence-ish numbers Trump presents, that reduction of deaths by 39 percent and the low mortality rate. Continue reading.
The architect of Florida’s COVID-19 data dashboard claims that she was fired by the state’s health department for refusing to “manually change data to drum up support for the plan to reopen.”