I thought we were past the lottery, I am not the one that uses percentage points, it is the media that uses percentage points for capacity.
Exactly!
But not just them. Pretty much anyone that might be trying to project/frame a particular numerical idea (or sway an opinion) will use a mathematical representation (a percentage, a number, etc) that best accentuates the idea they want you to walk away with. You know, people like politicians, vacation time share salesmen, etc...
This is why it is
SOOOO important that you know and understand what a particular percentage actually represents. Does it represent 2, 3, 20, 100, 1000, 1,000,000 or ???
100% of a dollar is still only a dollar, but a measly 1% of a million dollars is $10,000.
This also works the other way around as well! Just knowing a specific number does not necessarily put things in the correct perspective.
Say the White House tells us that 330,000 people are being tested everyday for Covid. That's great, seems like a pretty big number, right?
But really, that 330,000 number isn't telling us much about the
overall testing situation. To see and understand that, you
DO need to look at it from a percentage basis.
330k a day means we test way less than 1% of the US population every day (US pop. ~330 million). If we continued at that rate (didn't slow down or speed up), it would take about 1000 days (~2.75 years) to test our entire population just once - and we will all likely need to be tested a number of times before this thing is done.
Even if they ramped testing up to 3.3 million a day, it would still take about 3 months to test everyone just once.
So I guess the take away from all this - like most things in life - is to not take things at face value. Be sure to look at things from a number of perspectives in order to best understand them.
