STUART THEOBALD: Data can’t be taken at face value during these strange times
04 October 2020 - 17:07
In normal times we become, perhaps unwisely, comfortable with what statistics mean. We see a number — GDP growth, unemployment — and immediately think we know something about how the world is changing.
But Covid-19 has caused what statisticians call a regime change, because the underlying conditions that generate the data fundamentally changed during the lockdown. Simultaneously, the act of data gathering itself was disrupted. ..
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