Numbers with little meaning

摘要

YOU will probably have read that there are going to be X thousand deaths from coronavirus in the country you live in. You may also have read that there are going to be an order of magnitude more or fewer deaths. You would be right to be unsure which is correct. It could be any of them, or none. President Donald Trump has been talking about a possible 100,000 to 200,000 coronavirus deaths in the US if his administration "does well" at tackling the virus. In the UK, there has been talk of 20,000 deaths if measures work and 250,000 without restrictions. There has been no shortage of other estimates put forward by people with little experience of epidemiology, some of which come in very low indeed.