An Enigma: Transmission Of Epidemic Influenza (part 8)
I attempt to shed light on the riddle that is seasonal influenza using my bag of spanners. Today I go back and look at the raw count data for deaths and population
In the last article in this series we waded through a few time series slides to get a feel of the impact of coding changes affecting estimates of mortality for respiratory death, and influenza death in particular. This is an important topic to get our heads round because you can bet your bottom dollar that some unscrupulous types are going to gloss over this issue and claim all manner in the name of pandemics, pathogens and preventative medicine.
I’m going to flip to using scatterplots coded using a simple binary indicator variable to indicate adoption of WHO rule 3 during the guinea pig era of 1984 – 1992, and again from 2001 onwards. I’m also going to abandon mortality estimates in favour of raw counts; a move that some readers might find more intuitively accessible1. But it isn’t just about intuition; there being more to the matter than meets the eye: get the population estimate wrong and you trash everything you thought you knew about death!
Yer Rant, Innit?
I’m pretty sure I’ve rante…