Thank you and I also didn't think you meant to imply that such numbers can not be reported, I merely stated a fact. The data is publicly available on the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 Dashboard that I linked to above as my source.
How is it deliberately deceptive? Is that not a non sequitur?
No, it is not a
non sequitur: things can be deceptive unintentionally.
Moreover, even truthful statements can be deceptive in intent, in effect, or both if they omit crucial context. Headlines are peculiarly susceptible to that because they are so brief that they necessarily omit most information
There are a number of related issues, represented by different statistics. One common statistic is the "case fatality rate," which measures how lethal the disease is in diagnosed cases. It has to be used with extreme care to avoid giving misleading implications. First and foremost, because it ignores
undiagnosed cases, it is biased, often strongly biased,
in favor of countries with a weak medical infrastructure because many people in such countries never receive a diagnosis, let alone an autopsy to determine cause of death. It is also biased by a decision on whether to include fatalities where the patient is merely known to have had the disease at time of death or whether to include only fatalities where it is quite probable that the patient died of the disease.
A related statistic is the infection fatality rate, which measures deaths from the disease in those who are infected. In principle, it is a much more informative statistic than the case fatality rate. In practice, it is not reliable, both because the number of infections is an estimate, with its crudity depending on the degree of testing and the accuracy of the tests, and because even the direction of bias cannot be reliably estimated.
A third statistic is the mortality rate, which measures fatalities from the disease as a percentage of population. Conceptually, it is the product of two ratios, the rate of infection, which is the number infected divided by the population, and the infection fatality rate, which is the number infected who died divided by the number number infected. The mortality rate thus
confounds the effect of two different things and thus conceptually has almost no significance. Moreover, it suffers from the same sources of bias as the case fatality rate.
Thus, your statistic may mean: (1) the UK is suffering from a much higher rate of infection than the world as a whole, (2) the UK is suffering from a much higher high ratio of deaths among those infected than the world as whole, or (3) the UK has much more exact statistics on public health than the world as a whole. In the first two cases, the implication is adverse to the UK. In the third case, it is the reverse of adverse to the UK. When a statement, however truthful, may mean completely contrary things, it is misleading.
