Think critically about what you read
Deconstructing a recent newspaper headline about vaccination rates
Today I noticed The Age was running with the headline: In just five days, China administered 100 million COVID-19 vaccine shots. I thought that’s a lot. I thought it was a lot because 100 million sounds like a really big number. Like four times the Australian population. Also, the use of the word ‘just’ in the headline left me thinking that in a small number of days (just five) a big number of vaccine shots (100 million) were given. Seems impressive. Go China!
Then my brain said, hang on, there’s a lot of people in China, you should check how that compares to the number of people in Australia vaccinated yesterday. So I did that:
First the data.
Vaccinations yesterday Australia: 143,659 doses in past 24 hours (at 3rd June)
Vaccinations recently in China: 100 million in just five days, or 20 million per day
The population of Australia: 25,788,360
The population of China: 1,444,484,633
Then the maths, calculating the proportion of each population given a vaccine shot.
Australia: 143,659 / 25,788,360 = 0.6% of the population
China: 20 million / 1,444,484,633 = 1.4% of the population
Also, the article then says America ‘reached around 3.4 million shots per day in April when its drive was at full tilt’. With a population of 332,811,374, that’s 1.0% of it’s population. This is not a very different number to 0.6% or 1.4% of the population.
This wasn’t what I expected given the headline that got me thinking about this in the first place. True that China is vaccinating more of its population each day (at the moment) than Australia. And at full tilt, America was somewhere in between Australia and China. But also, they’re all around 1% (again, at the moment).
When I first read the headline, my response was frustration that Australia wasn’t doing better, it implied that China was doing amazing. Now that I’ve done the maths I’m wondering if actually the current Australian rate is quite good, but was just slow to get started. Or, am I just unable to comprehend the enormous size of China and so I’m easily bamboozled by a number like 100 million. I wonder how many other countries vaccination rates hit about 1% at full tilt?
The takeaway
Sometimes a headline is both true and confusing. It’s complicated to interpret data, and it’s easy to present data to create a message that tells a story in many different ways.
You can check the numbers yourself, like I did. And then try to form your own opinion. In this case, I think there isn’t enough information to conclude standout performance for China. I am now curious about whether most countries get to that vaccination rate of 1% when they start really trying. Looks like that might be true for China, Australia and the USA.
Do this yourself
It is actually easier than you think to check out numbers that people quote to you. I wanted to note this newspaper article as an example of this idea, and have my thinking stored away to share in the future as a working example. If doing this type of thinking seems useful to you, here’s a 4 step process you can follow to do the same kind of critical thinking next time you read a headline with impressive-sounding numbers in it. Re-reading this process below before I hit publish, it looks both ridiculously simple, and also very complicated at the same time. In any case, I hope it’s helpful.
Practice having curiosity framing whenever you receive information.
Use Google to help you find the data you’d need to validate that information.
Do the maths yourself - often addition, subtraction, multiplication and division is all you need.
Think to yourself if you want to come to a different conclusion.
Great post Lina! thank you