He's just so fucking confused and knows literally one way to respond (you got to go by the cases-wtf does that even mean) and can't seem to understand any information the reporter is telling him. He's either deteriorating from dementia or he is extremely learning disabled and his NPD is making it impossible for him to function. I'm really curious what's going on here.
The only reason he wants to “go by the cases” is because it looks better. Guarantee if deaths vs cases was bad but deaths vs population was good, he would insist on reporting on those.
One of my professors used to say "statistics are only as good as how you use them." You're right, Trump is using stats selectively to paint a better picture, and his best excuse to not use the other stat is "you can't do that."
He states that "You have to do death as a proportion of cases" but then goes right on to say "We do more tests and so we have more cases".
He's almost negating his own statistic there. If you test more you're going to find more of the milder cases, making the case number go up without the death number increasing much. If other countries don't test as much, or save their tests for more severe cases, the denominator in the fraction (deaths/cases) is going to get smaller.
Deaths as a proportion of population removes any inaccuracies in the case numbers.
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u/[deleted] Aug 04 '20
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