Statistics for advocacy

Statistics are for everyone, not just statisticians or the government.

Every day, the mass media has new numbers about the COVID-19 pandemic: the new infections, deaths, recoveries, and the balance of active cases. These figures come from the Department of Health, which intends them for the general public to know, so that the people might cooperate with the effort to combat the pandemic.

Consider the recent reports of the number of lawyers killed under the present administration and under previous ones, as compiled by the Integrated Bar of the Philippines. Or the count of extrajudicial killings in the course of the war on drugs, as compiled by the Commission on Human Rights. Or the number of Chinese-Filipinos kidnapped within a time period, as monitored by Teresita Ang See’s Movement for the Restoration of Peace and Order.

March, the official Month for Women, is a time to review statistics on the welfare of women. Since March 20th is the United Nations’ International Day of Happiness, it is when the statistics-packed World Happiness Report comes out.

When advocates who want to publicize their cause find that statistics about it don’t exist, they often figure out a way to generate the statistics themselves. For instance, Transparency International’s prize-winning Corruption Perceptions Index is based on responses of business executives to surveys by consulting firms about corruption in the countries where the businesses operate.

The general advocacy of Social Weather Stations is to promote overall human well-being by measuring it meaningfully—which definitely means NOT using the Gross National Product. This is why it has regularly surveyed poverty, hunger, gainers/losers, and many other dimensions of well-being for over three decades. Since 1992, the SWS surveys have been done quarterly, precisely in order to compete against the GNP statistics.

On the other hand, the Philippine Statistics Authority, as far as I know, did not survey hunger at any time during the pandemic. It has not budged from its triennial reporting of poverty. The latest PSA poverty report was for reference year 2018. The next one is supposed to be 2021, and will probably be released only in 2022.

As of March 24, the infection rate per million of the population (1Mpop) is 6,264 in the Philippines, which is much less than the 16,169 average infection rate in the world. The death rate per 1Mpop is 118 in the Philippines, or much less than the 355 average death rate in the world. The death rate among those infected is 1.9 percent in the Philippines, or lower than the 2.2 percent average in the world. These are worldometers.info statistics.

Although the Philippine health statistics are actually not too bad, compared to the rest of the world, the government’s repression of the economy is extremely, and I think unjustifiably, drastic. As a result, the impact of the pandemic on Filipino well-being has been unprecedentedly terrible (“Catastrophic times,” 8/15/20; “The destruction of jobs,” 8/22/20; “Sounding the hunger alarm,” 10/3/20; “Surveys of suffering,” 10/10/20; “Grim Christmas statistics,” 12/26/20; original reports are in www.sws.org.ph).

Can curfew advocates produce statistics to show that transmission of the virus is more risky at night compared to the day? Can lockdown advocates produce data on the infection rates in public transportation, schools, malls, churches, theaters, and parks when face masking, face shielding, and physical distancing are properly practiced? I suspect they don’t have the data, due to failure to implement an effective tracing system.

Statistics don’t grow on trees. Those who think there is scientific basis for the measures they advocate have the burden of devising and implementing the means of getting the data to prove it.

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Contact mahar.mangahas@sws.org.ph.