Summary
It took me less than 5 minutes of research to prove why we should be skeptical of the blind panic sweeping the county about the coronavirus
To support this I have built a simple Power BI visual to present Stats Canada data and to put the current number of coronavirus deaths into perspective.
I am sharing this because the overreaction to this “pandemic” is going to have real consequences for those who loose jobs, business and loved ones.
We need to put some perspective on the actions underway by the Canadian government. This is not meant to be smug or clever. It is designed to add some context to what people are seeing (from three weeks of isolation) and to remember this come next election (at all levels).
Research Methodology (aka Google)
For argument sake, let’s pretend that (a) I did believe the news on the major networks and (b) I thought the academics and bureaucrat warning us of climate change were also correct about the pandemic ravaging the county.
Listening to the news it seems a plague of biblical proportions is headed our way. The numbers sound big….. I guess.
Fortunately where I live, we have this thing called the internet, so I fire up “The Google” (my kids hate when I say that).
Health Canada sounds like a good place to start:
Step 1 – Enter two words,
Step 2 – Click three links
We get our answer. Today (April 2, 2020) there are just over 11,000 cases – sounds pretty bad, right. I guess. Elapsed time – less than 2 minutes
Click another link and we see at as of 2020-04-02 07:20 EDT there are 138 deaths. Here is the link
Ok… that’s seems pretty bad. But how bad? I have no idea.
Canada must keep records of deaths in the county. I’m familiar with Stats Canada. So off to their site
Google -> Stats Can. Click first link. Enter search term and first table is list of deaths in the country from 2014 – 2018. Scroll through the table and the numbers are shocking. In 2018 there were 283,706 deaths in Canada.
Again total time less than 2 minutes.
For once I will keep my opinions of media, government and academia to myself so that I can describe the data.
On the first page of the report we see a total virus deaths of 138 compared to 2018 total deaths of 283,706 which equals 0.05% or 1/20th of 1%. That’s a pretty low number! Off to the right you can see all the different causes listed by Health Canada. I don’t know what many of them are, but you can quickly see the numbers caused by the coronavirus are dwarfed by the big one’s you’d expect. But a quick scroll down the page and you’ll see there were more deaths caused surgery complications (170) than the numbers to date.
Conclusion
This is not to diminish the pain and sorrow of death, but we really need to put this overreaction we currently occurring in this county into perspective. Even if you are not like me and enjoy building reports, a quick bit of research should be enough to make you question what you are being told by the media and the government.