One thing that I haven’t thought much about until recently is that almost all causes of deaths in Low income/low-middle income countries are modeled rather than aggregations of recorded causes of death. So how much should we actually trust the statistics on things like “440,000 people died last year from malaria (or X,000 from Y country)?” Should we assume it’s within a ~20% band of reasonableness, or is our actual understanding of the situation much blurrier than that?
Of course, every death from preventable disease is one too many, but it’s good to have a clear/crisp/accurate understanding of the world to prioritize accordingly.
One thing that I haven’t thought much about until recently is that almost all causes of deaths in Low income/low-middle income countries are modeled rather than aggregations of recorded causes of death. So how much should we actually trust the statistics on things like “440,000 people died last year from malaria (or X,000 from Y country)?” Should we assume it’s within a ~20% band of reasonableness, or is our actual understanding of the situation much blurrier than that?
Of course, every death from preventable disease is one too many, but it’s good to have a clear/crisp/accurate understanding of the world to prioritize accordingly.