News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Daily U.S. death toll will exceed 9/11′s for months, CDC director says. Parent comment

Re:Daily U.S. death toll will exceed 9/11′s for months, CDC ... by lutorm on Friday December 11, 2020 @02:31PM (#25389736)
Why? For a roughly stable population like the US, the "baseline" is that something like 1/79/52 of the population dies every week, since life expectancy is 79 years. Zero deaths is nonsensical.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Daily U.S. death toll will exceed 9/11′s for months, CDC ... by sp332 on Friday December 11, 2020 @02:37PM (#25389846)
The difference between the peak of this year and previous years is about 50%. The graph makes it look much larger.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Daily U.S. death toll will exceed 9/11′s for months, CDC ... by CivBase on Friday December 11, 2020 @02:45PM (#25389975)
That's not the point. It's very hard to appreciate the scale of a difference between two elements on a graph if the graph's scale does not start at zero.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Daily U.S. death toll will exceed 9/11′s for months, CDC ... by phaemon on Friday December 11, 2020 @04:20PM (#25391158)
That's completely wrong. And by that I mean "you just failed your statistics class" wrong.

Imagine you had a graph of earth's temperature and decided to set the y axis at absolute zero. What would that look like? Would it be in any way useful?

[ Parent | on HN ]