Numbers don’t always tell the real story

My Viber chat group has been abuzz the past few days with reports about and comments on a guy who collapsed during a basketball game of an alumni tournament involving not-so-young (48-55 years old) men. It caused a lot of concern because a few months ago, a young high school student had likewise collapsed during a basketball game and subsequently passed away in hospital.

These incidents recalled one similar incident some years back involving the son of a prominent family. Aside from basketball (now don’t go concluding that basketball is bad for your health!), the similarity is that all of them were apparently healthy, fit, sports-minded guys. If not, they would be playing video games or watching Netflix instead of being on the court.

Anti-vaxxers in the chat group were quick to jump on this, saying that vaccines increase the risks of heart disease, of getting heart attacks and strokes, citing “studies” on “excess mortality,” a term defined as “the number of deaths from all causes during a crisis above and beyond what we would have expected to see under ‘normal’ conditions.”

The COVID-19 pandemic is certainly not what you would call normal, and the increased number of deaths for 2020 and 2021 can reasonably be attributed to COVID. This is true not only in the Philippines, but worldwide. A report in the journal The Lancet estimated that “18.2 million people died worldwide because of the COVID-19 pandemic” during the period Jan. 1, 2020 to Dec. 31, 2021, although the WHO reported deaths were at 5.94 million.

Deaths in the country reportedly went up by 33 percent in 2021. Anti-vaxxers further cite statistics (I don’t know if these are verified) that from March to September 2021, excess deaths went up by 64 percent, pointing out that March was when the country’s vaccine rollout started. That’s stretching statistics quite a bit, if you ask me; the numbers don’t say what the causes of death were, and what particular conditions, medical or otherwise, they had.

I guess we see what we want to see, even in cold, hard numbers. Statistics can be cited to tell different stories, depending on how they are interpreted.

There are no numbers for how many lives were saved by vaccines, how many people were not added to the statistics on death even though they got infected but were vaccinated and boosted. As we send students back to school and open up the economy to allow people to go back to work, it is now even more important to get people jabbed and boosted.

This virus is relatively new, so doctors and scientists and epidemiologists don’t have all the information about it, how it will further evolve and mutate. But working with what they do know, these experts have come out with vaccines that are used all over the world, and though the number of deaths is tragic, the number of lives saved is more than enough reason to get the jab and keep our families and our communities safe. – Andrea Santos-Curtis, Antipolo City