Making sense of numbers

As a student of data visualisation, COVID19 gives me many opportunities of looking at the data. I started plotting different graphs to analyse the situation. However, before getting into graphs, I overlooked something very basic concept which we learn in school. "Sense of proportion". In simple terms, population of India is approximately 1,35,00,00,000. Out of those, as of today, we have about 1,50,000 COVID19 positive cases. Lets do simple math. There are 0.00074% people are COVID19 positive in India. Even if it goes to 2 Lakhs the percentage would be 0.01% people will be affected. Now, I am talking about positive cases and not number of deaths. The ratio of number of deaths are 0.00023%. 

Now, let's take an example of number of accidents per year. In 2018, there were 1,50,000 deaths because of accidents. That means there are about 0.011%. The ratio of deaths because of accidents are much higher than that of COVID19. 

Since, we have numbers, let's talk about the lockdown. The main idea of lockdown was to stop COVID19. With that logic, we should have stopped using any vehicles long back because of chance of  an accident. We are forgetting the the sense of proportion. Considering the numbers, India has already achieved victory over the pandemic. Now we need to start thinking about how to be normal. With current lockdown, we are absolutely not normal. 

The problem of migrants we created because we have not announced the release plan. People go into panic mode when they do not know what is coming in future. Why many people were not migrating at the lockdown 1.0? Why is sudden surge in lockdown 3.0. Thats because they were thinking we will start getting jobs after lockdown 1.0 will get over. But when they see no opening up of jobs, they started going back. Because no one knows when everything will be normal. 

I see that in our household as well. Currently, in my area most of shops were open for a week. We thought, we are getting back to normal. But suddenly today, shops were forced to close down. When you have uncertainty, you try to stock-up essentials. More you want to stock up, more likely you want to go out to buy things. 

We really have to announce the approach of normal and avoid any surprises. More we surprise people, more panic we create. We just have to remember, COVID19 is just like a flu. It will come and go away. 

Another thing we really have to stop doing is sending non-sense WhatsApp’s messages about COVID19. For example, 4 people found in that area.. don't go there and all. That is the most stupid thing we are doing. Yes, there is COVID19 in the world. There will be some positive cases found. They recover. How many messages we got that 10 people recovered in that area? Single one? Not even that. If we have fear, we can not live our life. Just overcome the fear created by media and ignore messages. Let's get back to our work. Karmayog!!! 

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