![]() ![]() In the past month in China, hospitals, pharmacies, and funeral homes have been overwhelmed, but the scale of the misery is anyone’s guess. The country that was home to the first coronavirus outbreak may now experience its worst. Last month, China, after suppressing the virus for three years through its often draconian “zero COVID” policy-recording just five thousand COVID deaths in a population of 1.4 billion-abruptly abandoned that approach and is now consumed by an enormous viral surge. Press play again and India is engulfed in a viral inferno that threatens not only its own citizens but, because it stopped exporting vaccines for half a year, millions of lives around the world. Let it roll a few more months and European countries botch their reopening, unleashing a wave of deaths. Cut the graph at the summer of 2020 and the United States is a catastrophic outlier, a beacon of pandemic mismanagement. ![]() ![]() Throughout the pandemic, we have truncated not the y-axis but the x-axis: stopping time to pass judgment on a nation’s performance instead of waiting to consider the broad sweep of the COVID-19 years. But if you hack off empty space at the bottom and zoom in on the action, the line takes off like a rocket. A trend line starts in a chart’s midsection and moseys up and to the right-a gradual rise over time. In “How to Lie with Statistics,” a best-selling book from 1954, the journalist (and tobacco apologist) Darrell Huff details common techniques for manipulating people’s understanding of reality, among them truncating the y-axis of a graph. ![]()
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