One man's cherry-picking is another man's apples-to-apples comparison. If you want to compare the base mortality of two diseases in different times, you do need to correct for differences in lifestyle and healthcare standards, otherwise the comparison is meaningless.
I have no opinion on the merits of the chosen comparison, but if your position is that it is fair to compare the baseline mortality rate of a pandemic that occurred right after a devastating world war with the baseline mortality rate of a pandemic under 21st-century health care and information systems, then I would also accuse you of cherry-picking your statistics: you need to include both the differences in healthcare and the differences in case numbers in your comparison.
I didn't say what is fair, so please don't bother making such insinuations. Let qualified researchers decide that. I simply pointed out the flaws in the comparison made by Lead Stories and how they used it to justify a misleading claim.
The article made an extremely specific comparison - all-time Spanish Flu toll versus COVID toll in a very specific time and place where it was especially bad - did not justify it, and used it to imply a broader claim about the relative deadliness of the pandemics. And the broader claim was explicit before they changed the headline.
I reject the idea that the appropriate comparison is subjective in this context of fact-checking. Lead Stories cannot freely make whatever comparison it feels justified and present the result as a fact about the relative deadliness of the 1918 and COVID pandemics. The most relevant facts prima facie are those presented in my initial post. If someone wishes to argue that COVID is more deadly after controlling for XYZ, the proper forum for that is a peer-reviewed scholarly research article.
> One man's cherry-picking is another man's apples-to-apples comparison. If you want to compare the base mortality of two diseases in different times, you do need to correct for differences in lifestyle and healthcare standards, otherwise the comparison is meaningless.
Is it though?
I get that if you're talking about how much money something cost in 1918 and how much it cost today you'd want to take inflation into account otherwise everything in 1918 is "free" (or 90%+ discounted) compared to today.
But when you're talking about lives and deaths, well, I mean I don't think a life back then is worth any more or less than a life today. On a population adjusted basis a single death "counts" more insofar as there were fewer people around so a death is a larger percentage of the world population. But it doesn't inherently have less value.
One man's cherry-picking is another man's apples-to-apples comparison. If you want to compare the base mortality of two diseases in different times, you do need to correct for differences in lifestyle and healthcare standards, otherwise the comparison is meaningless.
I have no opinion on the merits of the chosen comparison, but if your position is that it is fair to compare the baseline mortality rate of a pandemic that occurred right after a devastating world war with the baseline mortality rate of a pandemic under 21st-century health care and information systems, then I would also accuse you of cherry-picking your statistics: you need to include both the differences in healthcare and the differences in case numbers in your comparison.