A lot has been objectively determined again in the past week. Who betrayed the residents of the Secret Annex: we now know 85 to 87 percent for sure, according to a forensic statistician. That corona does lead to more suicides: among young people, these rose by 15 percent in the past year. And of course that 2G does not work well with the Omikron variant. It can decrease the reproduction number by 9.8 percent, but at a high reproduction number, that is too little.
Things exist when they are quantifiable: percentages inspire confidence. They are therefore often the end point of the discussion, not the beginning. You normally see this already during budget and election debates, for which politicians diligently memorize the relevant purchasing power percentages. They then bring it up like a piece on a chessboard: your purchasing power drops by x percent! Pats, chess!
Corona has further strengthened the reign of statistics. Even the largest alpha is now delving into graphs and tables: without knowledge of the latest percentages, you cannot count in the corona debate. My favorite essayist Justin EH Smith, whom I have mentioned before, lamented this in his essay last fall Covid Is Boring. Why, he wondered, do all intellectuals now share statistics about new variants and the effectiveness of face masks? How can that pass for an interesting debate?
At first I thought: boring? How can you call corona boring? I myself had also fanatically descended into the shadow world of graphs and statistics. Percentages are like bait: they attract attention and you bite at them, hungry for knowledge.
But percentages often explain less than they promise. They are debatable, arbitrary, or just insignificant, and even at best they only illuminate part of reality. That “85 to 87 percent” is of little help as long as we don’t know how the forensic statistician arrived at this curiously specific number. A 15 percent increase in suicides isn’t a spectacular increase, especially when it comes to such a small number: 300 in 2021. (And apart from that, it just seems like suicides only become a problem if they increase in number.)
The corona percentages also have their defects. As Jaap van Dissel said at the technical briefing this Thursday: “A model is only as good as its assumptions.” And those assumptions are uncertain. So is the new model over 2G, which assumes people now have half the normal number of contacts, increasing by 17 percent as society opens up. Also important, the 9.8 percent reduction in reproductive numbers assumes an “optimum situation” in which unvaccinated people don’t seek refuge elsewhere — unrealistic, the researchers say.
You can have interesting discussions about all those percentages. I even think there’s something addictive about it, that bite of it. You feel like a real sleuth, someone who uncovers the truth piece by piece. However, those percentages are often besides the point. You can summarize that 2G report as: it may help a little bit, but there are also drawbacks. That decision is then made by people. As political philosopher Josette Daemen wrote last December in Socialism and Democracy: we should not think “that numbers, meters and graphs are able to tell us what to do.”
Nevertheless, the MPs had learned all the numbers by heart before the corona debate this Thursday. 25 percent of the young people have psychological complaints (Fleur Agema), or 51 percent of the students (Caroline van der Plas). 2G provides a reduction of 0.7 percent compared to 3G (Lisa Westerveld). Rutte had promised “20 to 25 percent contact reduction” during the evening lockdown (Agema again); was it reached? Rutte: “I think it is, but we are going to find out very precisely.” The introduction of 1G policy can lead to “a 50 percent decrease in visits to all kinds of faculties”, according to Minister Kuipers, to which Tunahan Kuzu corrected: “It is 44.9 percent to be exact.”
It is actually degrading, I thought, to let those MPs have discussions about statistics all the time. They deserve better. And we, the viewers/voters, just as much.
Floor Rusman ([email protected]) is editor of NRC
A version of this article also appeared in NRC Handelsblad on 22 January 2022
A version of this article also appeared in NRC on the morning of January 22, 2022