Milhouse declares pandemic over, announces retirement
It was a sobering morning for critics of the public health response to SARS-CoV2 in Ontario, as one of “our” leading analysts announced that he “will fade away as mysteriously as I arrived in April 2020.” When I say “he”, I am making an assumption about the person behind the anonymous Twitter account @Milhouse_Van_Ho based on the gender of his eponymous Simpsons character. (The account’s preferred pronouns “Me/I/I’m” are a bit difficult to interpret and integrate into my plain English sentences ;)
Milhouse has a way of presenting Statistics Canada and other government data that opened the eyes of his 33,867 followers. His “Mortality in Canada” threads were legend. The charts of weekly deaths illustrated the substitution of “deaths with/from Covid-19” for other causes of death, with little impact on the long-term seasonal mortality cycles. Pandemic, where art thou?
Milhouse’s barcharts of the age stratification of 2020/21 “Covid-19 deaths” compared to all deaths (from the most recent available mortality data) showed two things: (1) When using raw counts (number of deaths per age range), the negligible impact of COVID on all deaths becomes apparent, even in those over 80. (2) When using normalized data (percent of either Covid-19 deaths or all deaths per age range), the skewed impact of the pandemic on the elderly emerges and the need for focused protection rather than blanket mandates is obvious.
I have used the above and other Milhouse charts directly or as inspiration for my own analyses and writing. They also played a key role in the class on how (not) to lie with statistics in the pilot offering of my Introduction to Citizen Research course.
Milhouse, you will be missed. Let’s hope that you’re right in calling Covid off. Happy “retirement” and hasta la vista until the next medical mass hysteria…