Breaking news at 100M or at 5.01M?

Breaking news at 100M or at 5.01M?

It was breaking news!  

The regularly scheduled news items had to be stopped on live stream.  This could not just wait.

“We interrupt ongoing news stories to report that Corona infections have hit 100 million, repeat, Breaking news, Corona infections have hit 100-million infections worldwide.”

White text on a red ticker below the TV screen left no doubt about this news item.

For AJZ to have interrupted their evening news midstream!  This was quite something.  I would soon be online checking my news sources* to see if this was a real deal.  But my discovery was even different.  The numbers were more of 101M, not even that 100M.  100,639,974 to be exact, with 2,161,074 deaths and 72,587,082 recovered?  Even Kenya had something 100 in the numbers - 100,193 infections, 1,750 fatalities and 83,625 recoveries.

But why was it a big deal?  The number of infections were expected to rise and at some point it would reach 100M anyway.  In fact, you do not need to break any news when at some point the numbers shall reach 110M, and then 150M and so on.  If we are to break news every time we hit double zeros, then breaking news shall lose meaning.  I am generally a numbers person, and I can tell you that numbers can be mispresented to cause misinterpretation.  It is for that reason that I would offer free advice to anyone that ‘Numbers should always be taken in context’.  

This is how to contextualize the numbers… I would look at the numbers with a view of seeing some trends, and finding out if there are noteworthy changes in trend over time… something that points to a new context that was not known before.  In my case, the trend that I would look out for would be the ‘fatality rate’.  

And... my findings are that this rate has remained about 2% since 2020.  It is still 2% even now in this breaking news time.  Now, seriously speaking, and based on this measure, has anything changed for the worse?  Unfortunately, not.  What happened last year is still happening now – there is nothing different today, even as the news breaks.

Talking about differences, was there anything to break news when I did my long run today in the evening?  No.  I started the run at 4.00pm, through the usual route past Kabete Poly, crossed Waiyaki way, then ran to Ndumbo.  From Ndumbo I ran down Kapenguria road to Lower Kabete road then diverted to the left to run through Mary Leakey route and across the Uni farm.  The route was the same old.  Nothing was different.  It was similar to what I ran last year, or even last week.

When I emerged at ‘the tank’ from the University farm route, I turned right to join Kanyariri road and ran all the way past Kanyariri market, where I did a U-turn and ran back straight all the way to Ndumbo market.  I kept running and would soon join Waiyaki way and kept running along it.  Ten minutes later and I would be crossing Waiyaki way back to Kabete Poly ready to finish the run.  I would eventually finish the run around 6.10pm.  

The route remained the same old – nothing new.  An average of 5.01min per km was however record breaking in 2021 – even if I was to look at the trends.  Had it been 5.20min per km, then it would have been same old.  And back to that AJZ story… their numbers were from a different source**, which I still checked and confirmed.  Meaning, take numbers with a pinch of salt – numbers do not lie, they just tell different stories.  

Finally, we already have corona vaccines in commercial use in different countries in the world - US, UK, Germany, France, Israel, Canada, India, China, Russia, Brazil and the list goes on and on.  Even the new variant of corona, be it South African variant or UK variant are responding well to the existing vaccines already in US.  It is now just a matter of time.  Soon corona shall be vanquished.  So the numbers may not reach 200M and the trend may not remain in the 2% fatality... who knows, everything is possible.

* worldometers

** jhu

WWB, the coach, Nairobi, Kenya, Jan. 26, 2021