These are from Japan; as the article points out, Japan is one of only a few places you can get timely suicide numbers.
All the usual caveats apply regarding international or cross-cultural comparisons, of course.
These are from Japan; as the article points out, Japan is one of only a few places you can get timely suicide numbers.
All the usual caveats apply regarding international or cross-cultural comparisons, of course.
2 comments:
I eyeball the increase for October over the "baseline" as being only about 400-500. That's not good, but neither is it as dramatic as the headline's implication. The total "excess" is less than the reported Covid total.
I hope they can figure out what the problem is.
This year, as the 4 year presidential election cycle intersects the 10 year census cycle, we've proven Americans no longer know how to count.
Take the Iowa caucuses. Hard core party members -- who need a new (badly tested) app in order to rank preferences by headcount in a high school gymnasium. Hey guys, you couldn't wave a pointy-finger, count out loud, and write down tally marks on a chalk slate? A LITERAL "slate" ?
So the colleges closed the dorms. And the students moved off campus or to parents and their "homes of record" -- but the institutions had already turned in forecast residency numbers for dorms and Greek housing and affiliated near-campus housing. So the cohort between 18 and 24 (it now takes on average six years for students to complete a "four year" degree) will be counted twice. Nice for Massachusetts, I suppose...
Nielsen counting viewers for TV programs? HA! Advertisers trying to reach some mythical masses of LGBTQIA+ customers who might buy traditionally-"gendered" products? Ha-ha! Amazon or NYT counts of sales on "best-selling" books lists?
Oh, how about tracking diseases? Count deaths, hospital admissions, intensive care bed/slots, days-in-care, test-positive "cases", death-per-admission, death-rate-compared-to-cases, case-rate per capita by nation, case-rate-by-age by state? Now it's death by ethnicity. How 'bout a different number each week, just so long as this week's number is worse than last weeks?
Don't even START on simply counting numbers of ballots issued versus number of ballots returned... We'll just report percentages (to 3 decimal places) of votes "created or saved" for precincts with tens of thousands of voters, after hours, how'll that be?
The argument to "trust the experts" is particularly compelling to those who are utterly terrified of numbers -- which, sadly, seems to be at least a plurality nowadays.
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