Reflections on The Observer articles

With David Spiegelhalter, I wrote short articles about statistics.

Since the start of the pandemic, people are under bombardment by numbers and graphs. Daily figures fill news reports and mobile screens. Scenario models make headlines.

The request was simple: a column helping to explain Covid-19 statistics. David Spiegelhalter did the first one alone, on excess deaths. Volunteering as a Statistical Ambassador for the Royal Statistical Society, David asked me to help with an ongoing series. We worked together on FAQ answers for the RSS website, and continued our collaboration.

The column had several constraints. First, it could only be 350 words long. Second, there were no graphs. Third, there were no explanatory boxes. The articles were for the public: any statistical jargon had to have a definition in the text.

For example, this article was about describing ONS methods for estimating long Covid. (Image: The Observer)

That word limit is incredibly challenging. We recommend trying to write to that length without accompanying graphs. It is akin to altitude training for athletes: after writing within tighter bounds, longer articles become easier. Brevity is the soul of wit, and sometimes, the scorch of truth.

Upon these constraints, we added more, for clarity of purpose. The goal was to talk about statistics related to the pandemic. We are…