Covidiots do not understand Statistics and they do not want to understand the Base Rate Fallacy
‘Only 1% of COVID hospitalizations are vaccinated people’ sounds encouraging, doesn’t it? Likewise, doesn’t ‘50% of COVID hospitalizations were fully vaccinated’ make it sound like the vaccines aren’t working well?
In reality, if you’re trying to figure out how effective the COVID vaccines are, these particular statistics are useless. It is impossible to use this statistic alone to figure out how well the vaccines are working. By itself, this number provides incomplete information and is highly misleading. Here’s the Nerdy reason why….
The Base Rate Fallacy
This statistic confuses people because it invites them to commit a type of logical fallacy called the “base rate fallacy”. Logical fallacies are errors in reasoning that occur when our brains try to oversimplify things to make them easier to understand, but that oversimplification causes us to ignore key details, which often leads to inaccurate conclusions. The base rate fallacy is a type of logical fallacy that occurs when people try to estimate the chance of something happening based only on specific examples in front of them, ignoring the background levels of those events in the population.
An example: suppose two COVID patients were admitted to the hospital, one vaccinated and one not. The headline might (accurately) report that ‘50% of hospitalized COVID patients are vaccinated!’ Mathematically, this statement is true. And it sounds high, right? If we only focus on this percentage, we might conclude that vaccination makes no difference in the rate of hospitalization for COVID.
But what if I told you this hospital is located in a town of 100 people, where 98 people are vaccinated and only 2 are not. This dramatically changes our interpretation of what’s happening in the hospital — now we know only *1 in 98* vaccinated people are hospitalized for COVID, while *1 in 2* unvaccinated people are hospitalized. Rather than the % of the hospitalized who are vaccinated, we care most about rate of hospitalization in the vaccinated vs. the unvaccinated.
Clearly, the risk of hospitalization for vaccinated people is much lower than it is for unvaccinated people. But our headline provided only partial information, so it missed this conclusion entirely. Without the background rates of vaccination, it’s impossible to interpret the statistic provided in the headline. We simply don’t have enough information.
If this were a math test and we were asked to figure out how well the vaccines are working, but the only information we were given was ‘50% of hospitalized COVID patients are vaccinated,’ we couldn’t answer the test question. We’d have to walk up to the teacher and tell them that more information is needed.
The ‘headline statistic’ (the percent of COVID hospitalizations who were vaccinated) is highly dependent on the vaccination rate in the community. Below is an animated visual that helps make this counterintuitive concept a little clearer.
Covidiots do not understand the below Base Rate Fallacy Graph
Covidiots do not understand the below Base Rate Fallacy Video
This is the main reason why we call them Covidiots...not the sharpest tools in the shed.
It's still strange that government mandates in a Pandemic would cause these Covidiots to mentally break...resulting in them falling down a rabbit hole of strange/cult-like beliefs about vaccines while there are no longer vaccine mandates and enough people are now vaccinated so that the Covidiots in their community are more safer being not vaccinated.
That's the purpose of vaccines...to minimize the risk of a severe disease that could result in hospitalization and to protect the community...including protecting those that choose to be not vaccinated because there's less spread of the disease (fewer people having a severe Covid infection) within the community.
It is what it is.
wrbtrader
‘Only 1% of COVID hospitalizations are vaccinated people’ sounds encouraging, doesn’t it? Likewise, doesn’t ‘50% of COVID hospitalizations were fully vaccinated’ make it sound like the vaccines aren’t working well?
In reality, if you’re trying to figure out how effective the COVID vaccines are, these particular statistics are useless. It is impossible to use this statistic alone to figure out how well the vaccines are working. By itself, this number provides incomplete information and is highly misleading. Here’s the Nerdy reason why….
The Base Rate Fallacy
This statistic confuses people because it invites them to commit a type of logical fallacy called the “base rate fallacy”. Logical fallacies are errors in reasoning that occur when our brains try to oversimplify things to make them easier to understand, but that oversimplification causes us to ignore key details, which often leads to inaccurate conclusions. The base rate fallacy is a type of logical fallacy that occurs when people try to estimate the chance of something happening based only on specific examples in front of them, ignoring the background levels of those events in the population.
An example: suppose two COVID patients were admitted to the hospital, one vaccinated and one not. The headline might (accurately) report that ‘50% of hospitalized COVID patients are vaccinated!’ Mathematically, this statement is true. And it sounds high, right? If we only focus on this percentage, we might conclude that vaccination makes no difference in the rate of hospitalization for COVID.But what if I told you this hospital is located in a town of 100 people, where 98 people are vaccinated and only 2 are not. This dramatically changes our interpretation of what’s happening in the hospital — now we know only *1 in 98* vaccinated people are hospitalized for COVID, while *1 in 2* unvaccinated people are hospitalized. Rather than the % of the hospitalized who are vaccinated, we care most about rate of hospitalization in the vaccinated vs. the unvaccinated.
Clearly, the risk of hospitalization for vaccinated people is much lower than it is for unvaccinated people. But our headline provided only partial information, so it missed this conclusion entirely. Without the background rates of vaccination, it’s impossible to interpret the statistic provided in the headline. We simply don’t have enough information.
If this were a math test and we were asked to figure out how well the vaccines are working, but the only information we were given was ‘50% of hospitalized COVID patients are vaccinated,’ we couldn’t answer the test question. We’d have to walk up to the teacher and tell them that more information is needed.
The ‘headline statistic’ (the percent of COVID hospitalizations who were vaccinated) is highly dependent on the vaccination rate in the community. Below is an animated visual that helps make this counterintuitive concept a little clearer.
Covidiots do not understand the below Base Rate Fallacy Graph
Covidiots do not understand the below Base Rate Fallacy Video
This is the main reason why we call them Covidiots...not the sharpest tools in the shed.
It's still strange that government mandates in a Pandemic would cause these Covidiots to mentally break...resulting in them falling down a rabbit hole of strange/cult-like beliefs about vaccines while there are no longer vaccine mandates and enough people are now vaccinated so that the Covidiots in their community are more safer being not vaccinated.
That's the purpose of vaccines...to minimize the risk of a severe disease that could result in hospitalization and to protect the community...including protecting those that choose to be not vaccinated because there's less spread of the disease (fewer people having a severe Covid infection) within the community.
It is what it is.
wrbtrader
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