Media mistakes

[Black Hole]

Daily Mail, in an item about ME: "The condition affects about 404,000 people in the UK".

 

[gomezz]

Does that include family members etc?

 

[Robobunny]

Every lazy reporter is now using the rather precise 404,000 number (it only includes cases, @gomezz), badly qualified with either "about", "around" or "approximately" (as @Black Hole first noticed). They are passing on a precision mistake from the source, plus another important omission they were probably too lazy to notice. Uni of Edinburgh's study actually said "may be as high as" (i.e. an upper limit, an obvious but apparently missed fact) when stating % figures for women and men that are both <1% (of the population, to 2 decimal places), and said (this is the original media mistake) that total is "approximately 404,000". Open Access Government have now taken that mistake one step further, claiming "over 400,000 people are affected", which is just misuse of stats given the upper limit is "approximately 404,000", which is itself +/- quite a lot (>6700 on the rounding, never mind the uncertainty [read the study] in how these were estimated). Rant over, I'm only commenting on the media & numbers, not in any way on the illness and those suffering from it.

 

[EEPhil]

The yellow heat health alert is in effect from 10AM on 11/07/2025 until 9AM on 10/07/2025 across the East Midlands.

Looks like Dr Who posted that alert.