Have you ever been misled by statistics? Someone gives some impressive sounding numbers that make you go “Wow!” but then someone else gives another angle on the numbers that make you go “Oh, not as wow as I thought.”

500 annual deaths from influenza in New Zealand sounds pretty scary, until you realise that is one or two per day. And more than likely that is someone who has lived a long life and has spent some time on the respiratory ward in hospital for the past couple of weeks. A somewhat inevitable ending to life, sad though it is.

One perspective check that I use to test the fear or awe inducing statistics of the hype monster is abortion statistics. If I believe that abortion is the killing of a living baby, then this is my standard for fear or outrage at other things. For example, I should be more outraged or saddened about one baby dying from abortion than I should about one person dying at the end of their life from influenza. If I’m a greater advocate for lower council rates than for reducing abortion, I’m not keeping my perspective right.

Not everyone agrees that abortion is killing babies. But you must be able to see how this is a helpful way to put things into perspective.

So when it comes to pandemics, I have to keep in mind that there are about 13,000 abortions annually in New Zealand.

How many people are expected to die from COVID-19? Predictions vary, but one middle of the road estimate is six times that of seasonal influenza (calculated from here and here). Another pro-vaccination perspective I heard in a webinar was ten times that of seasonal influenza. So, 3000 to 5000 deaths over several years of the pandemic is a reasonable prediction.

If you’ve followed recent news, you’ll be aware that many of the deaths counted as COVID deaths would have happened even without COVID. One person was killed by being shot and was counted as a COVID death. At least two thirds of recorded COVID deaths are in this category according to one article.

If you care to do the math, that means COVID seems to be actually responsible for about 1000 to 1700 deaths in NZ in total over the course of the entire pandemic. Divided over a number of years, that’s pretty low.

Compared to abortion numbers it’s more than an order of magnitude lower, nearly two orders of magnitude lower.

I realise there was a lot of uncertainty 18 months ago that resulted in some guess work from the government in taking courses of action. Now that the modelling is clearer, it’s hard to see why we are so concerned as a nation (or a global citizen).

I realise there is still fear of over loading hospitals beyond capacity, but consider that there are some excellent early treatment options that can keep people out of hospital. For some reason both the NZ Medical Council and the government seem to have taken an active approach to suppressing the use of these safe and effective treatments. Politics and a broken system may be to blame here.

When you consider the economic and wellbeing cost to lockdowns, vaccine mandates, creating a category of lower class citizen, and the lives shortened due to delaying surgeries, along with what has already been discussed above; maybe it’s time to readjust your perspective?