Claiming we’re still in an emergency because “hospitals are busy” is a very, very basic error in selection bias.

in selection •  3 years ago 

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This is the kind of thing you learn about in week 1 of freshman statistics class. Think about it: the hospital is where people go who are in need of serious medical care. So if you’re at the hospital, BY DEFINITION you are in need of medical attention. Therefore we would expect it to be full of sick people. Frankly, it would be a little strange if it weren't. Thus a hospital setting is not a meaningful or analogous sample of the overall population. This is why pointing out the obvious—that hospitals are busy with sick people—isn’t a particularly groundbreaking or helpful insight. That is after all what they’re there for.

The only exception would be if hospitals were so busy that routine patients (who otherwise could have been helped) were regularly dying because the hospital didn’t have the capacity to serve them. This is not happening.

There is a reason America spent trillions of dollars on COVID stimulus bills and didn’t use any of that money to quickly build new hospitals: we didn’t need any.

All this to say, a busy hospital doesn’t mean the entire country is at risk. It merely means the specific people who are sick right now are exactly where they should be, getting the care they need.

To claim otherwise would be like inferring that all Americans must be in great shape because you hang out at CrossFit gyms...and most people there seem to have elite levels of physical fitness. It’s a very basic logical fallacy, one that a freshman would be docked points for on a paper.

And yet it seems to have become a rallying cry for those who want politicians to have more power: “but the hospitals are busy.”

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