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Coronavirus death rate: does axis length matter?

Mar 03, 2020
Hi, my name is Ivy Pain and I have a quick video about

axis

length

s and whether they

matter

especially when reporting data about virus forensics. Alice Casey sent out a tweet questioning the

length

of the shafts in this BBC graphic. The graph shows data from the Chinese. Center for Disease Prevention and Control on the disease's mortality

rate

s so far, here's your problem. She says we have a problem with the length of this bar because what happens when we look at a bar like that? We thought: Wow, bars go everywhere! Towards the right edge of the graph where it seems like everyone 80 and older is dying from this disease, it's time to get very nervous and worried about the disease, but it's only then and only the people looking at the bottom right of the graph. in the corner of the graph you realize that that bar actually only reaches 15% of the time, so we have a question:

does

it reach 100 or not?
coronavirus death rate does axis length matter
It is not a mistake for the BBC under normal circumstances to show only 15 per cent of Max, but what we have is a period of real concern, fake news or panic seems viable and we want, as data communicators, to consider what the Best way to show data in real light. 15 percent is the mortality

rate

for people age 80 and older, which means per 100 people. Those who have had the disease in China remember that 85 of them actually survived, so the problem with the BBC graph is not the data they show, but the data they don't show, let's look at some ways we can fix this first.
coronavirus death rate does axis length matter

More Interesting Facts About,

coronavirus death rate does axis length matter...

I tried just putting the labels on the bars, but I think yes, people will read it, but they may still see the length of the bar and be a little alarmed. I think this is the graph Alice had in mind if we extended the access to 100. but now we see that the bar is actually not very long because it goes to 100%, we could also affect the title and change the way people read these graphs, so changing the title now raises the question of whether it more accurately frames what people do. we're seeing, but I still think a key issue is the lack of data, the survival rate, so what if we also visualize the survival rate?
coronavirus death rate does axis length matter
In this case, the blue is the people who survived and died and the gray is the people who survived, so now you see the people who survived as well as the people who died. In fact, I think I'd finally remove the tags now that I have both categories displayed and I've also phrased the question to refer specifically to where this data source is coming from. around 44,000 cases in China and I think that, although perhaps in other circumstances I could simplify the title in this period when we have to be very careful with the way we communicate data, it is worth putting information about the data source in the title because not I don't know if this mortality rate is represented globally or is changing, so Alice put up a tweet suggesting that the one on the right was a bit alarmist, it's not a mistake to visualize data like this and I think so, if we wanted to be al minus a With as much fog as possible, perhaps we could think about visualizing the same data the way we have it on the right, so I would like to thank Alice for understanding the tweet.
coronavirus death rate does axis length matter
I thought this was an interesting exercise and I'm just waiting for data. Communicators can continue to do everything possible to spread news in a very calm and realistic collective way by showing all the data so that people can draw their own conclusions.

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