So let me get this right: They stop, or severely curtail testing for the swine flu this summer (point A).
Then, out of the blue the guestimate of swine flue cases and deathes has been tripled (point B).
How in the hell do supposed professionals get from point A to point B?
Even weather guessers use a lot of data to make their predictions and get it wrong on a regular basis. Now we have health guessers using no (or low amounts of) data to what? panic the populace that can't get the vaccine anyway? and to what availe?
Idjuts, just plain idjuts.
Boie--I hear you in the frustration. Wish we could figure out how to get some of these things right!!!
But...c'mon, Bogie...recognize the limitations one faces in using data - any kind of data. To my knowledge, no one has ever really been able to predict most human behaviors; and, I'm thinking, that human behaviors drive how the flu spreads and how it mutates. There are lots of ways of guestimating out there, but not one of them is foolproof. Only hindsight is 20/20...and...sometimes it isn't, either.
Now...the weather...that's a whole 'nuther thing. If human behavior is unpredictable, surely the weather is.
Then...there is quantum physics. The most predictable of all our sciences is unpredictable.
Posted by: Cop Car | November 14, 2009 at 11:38 AM
I understand the limitations of using data. But when you severely curtail the data that you can use (if they used sampling, that would be one thing - they don't though), and change the methods in which you decide to report the estimates, there seems to be shananigans going on. Kind of how they have "estimated" how many jobs were saved or created - how's that working out for representative numbers?
Posted by: bogie | November 15, 2009 at 06:36 AM
My younger brother used to say that he could torture the data to get anything he wanted. ; )
Posted by: Cop Car | November 15, 2009 at 10:00 AM