It is said that the first casualty of war is truth. In the purported war on coronavirus, Rod Liddle rightly asks ‘how reliable are the coronavirus figures?’ and comes to the conclusion the answer is ‘not very’. He is right, for at least two important reasons.
Firstly, not all states are carrying out the same number of tests per million people. For Germany, it is 2,023; Britain, 960; and France, 560. That has a consequence on the number of positive infected cases. Given that the most widely-accessed world rankings of total cases per country used by the media, such as Worldometers (updated in live-time), are based on that figure, the results are not hugely helpful.
Some might say this shows why we should use total number of deaths per country to determine the impact of coronavirus. Here, though, is the second problem: do countries record deaths in the same way?.
Take France, for instance.
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