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You raise a good point, Dick. Do you think our bent toward the actual deaths is because in some sense it is harder to prove how many lives were saved, or how many cases were milder than they might have been? Perhaps journalists are inclined to look at these projections as speculative?

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Thanks for reading, Mike. Maybe it's unease with projections (which I think go well beyond "speculation"), but I worry that it's also/instead a bias in favor of bad news over completing the picture with reference to the good. See today's column for a more extended discussion of another aspect of that.

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May 6, 2022Liked by Richard J. Tofel

Your piece made me think about times I've been accused of writing puff pieces or promoting some point of view, or even 'marketing' for something by using projections or extrapolations. That's anecdata, of course, and tangential to the point you're making. But it would encourage a bias toward bad news.

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