Re:What Statistics Can and Can’t Tell Us About Ourselves
by mcguire on Sunday September 15, 2019 @07:29PM
(#20980086)
"Then a biostatistician at Cambridge, Spiegelhalter found that Shipman’s excess mortality—the number of his older patients who had died in the course of his career over the number that would be expected of an average doctor’s—was a hundred and seventy-four women and forty-nine men at the time of his arrest."
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Re:What Statistics Can and Can’t Tell Us About Ourselves
by ohbleek on Monday September 16, 2019 @02:59AM
(#20981676)
Just to add to your comment: Excess mortality is the number of deaths, or mortality, caused by a specific disease, condition, or exposure to harmful circumstances such as radiation, environmental chemicals, or natural disaster. It's a measure of the deaths which occurred over and above the regular death rate that would be predicted (in the absence of that negative defined circumstance) for a given population.
Had the doctor not murdered any patients, he would have had the expected number of patient deaths, but the Cambridge statistician found that the number of patients that died under his care almost perfectly matched the expected number plus the number he murdered, meaning he was a statistically average doctor when he wasn’t murdering his patients.