For the next part in my ongoing (to eternity) and very popular series “All statistics IS bollocks” (and apparently a lot of grammar is too, innit), I’d like to look at… well, statistics, obviously.

A new one came out today in the sports pages. And remember, in the beautiful game that none can watch live, there is Mega-giga-tetra-things of data produced and stored at each minute of every game. So the raw data is all there. That’s not the problem. The problem, as always, is with the chosen form of analysis.

Today it was ‘points won compared to goals per game conceded in that time’, and that time, for the purposes of this instance of numerical diarrhoea, was since November 28th. Just like that. Not ‘January 1st’ or ‘the start of the season’, but November 28th. 14 days after my dad’s 96th birthday, just so you know its not just a random date. Anyway, what the statistics said aren’t even worth discussing. The POINT (if there is one, and its generally something I really try to avoid) is that I don’t question the results that these numbers represent. Nor the validity of the data. Just the fact that, as always, a statistic was needed to conform to the desired narrative. So they found one. Or created one. As in: there must be some line of mathematics that can bolster my argument that Manchester United are performing better than anyone else. We’ve tried all the usual ones, like ‘are they top of the league?’ And ‘are they really yo-yo-ing around in form under a pretty clueless manager?’ But they didn’t work, so we had to be a little more creative. Well, Jonathan Northcroft of The Times: WHO FUCKING CARES???

Especially as we’re in mid-fucking-pandemic mode and are already saturated daily with meaningless numbers. I wish I was a statistician today, I’d live in a palace and drive a… Prius. Only because they’re really not very imaginative people.

So now we have over 60,000 new cases of covid EVERY DAY!!!! Over 1000 people die every day. Again, meaningless numbers unless you happen to be one of the latter. In which case, my condolences.

But ‘it’s not enough’. Matt Hancock (how do you spell: ‘tosser’?) and Boris (ditto) have decided that the only way to beat Coronavirus is to statistically bamboozle your way out of it. Drugs won’t work. Medicines useless. Statistics is the only sure way.

So we need more testing. Which is in fact the only sensible thing they could say. And quicker testing. Again, WE KNOW THAT AND HAVE SINCE MARCH; WHERE THE FUCK HAVE YOU BEEN???? So Hancock is recommending ‘asymptomatic lateral flow testing’ to allow workers, like me, safe passage on the empty tube trains. And this random mass testing was almost really successful in Liverpool. And when I say ‘almost’ it is because lateral flow tests are up to 50% inaccurate. 50. Per. Cent. It would be cheaper to send everyone in the country a one pound coin and have them toss it to see if they have the virus. That would produce exactly the same degree of reliability. 50%.

However, if you measure: covid cases per day resulting in hospital admission but not ending in death and divide it by the number of vaccines we’ll be administering per week by March 22nd, and add in the square root of Boris Johnson’s inside leg measurement (in millimetres), you get an outstanding result which should encourage everybody that we are, in fact, headed in the right direction.

Fuck. Me.

A xxxx