Thanks to nancy689 for alerting me to this.
Lisa Summers last night:
I’ve got a couple of graphs to show where we are in Scotland. The first one is hospital deaths across the four nations and you can see that while it is still rising it’s not as steeply as it was a couple of weeks ago.
I don’t know where this graph comes from but, to be kind, it’s a bit sophisticated for a TV news broadcast and thus misleading. Summers doesn’t explain the left-hand axis with its logarithmic scale and, crucially, leaves it to misrepresent the differences in the covid-19 death rates.
The death rate statistics in England used in the above do not include the many deaths outside of hospitals while the Scottish ones used above do. They are not comparable.
Comparing the hospital death rates per capita, the line in the graph for England should rise to a point twice the height of that for Scotland.
If we’re using per capita figures, as we should to be meaningful, the line for Wales should also rise to a point twice the height of that for Scotland.
Is the aim here to suggest, wrongly, that the death rate in Scotland is the second-highest in the UK?
If we’re not using per capita figures but crude overall figures, as BBC Scotland is in the graph, then the line for England should rise to a point around twenty times the height of that for Scotland.
Talking-up Scotland 'Albatraz' 
Summers didn’t see this tweet. Or Panorama.
“Retweet on TwitterRev. Stuart Campbell RetweetedDaveDixon4Dave Dixon20h
Deaths per 1 million population by country
UK…………….650*
Belgium……..622
Spain…………496
Italy……………441
France……….350
USA……………167
Denmark………73
Germany………71
Greece…………13
New Zealand….4
*based on @FT figures”
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Scotland 229
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I’m a bit divided here. The purpose, as i see it and from the title, is to give positive news about Scotland but i don’t want to be like your typical Trump or Tory supporter and pretend everything in Scottish gov is rosy.
Read upside down those stats are not good at all.
Should i just wheesht?
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Scotland saves lives 😉
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Its almost if the BBC have no understanding of graphs and made a mistake, but how many ‘mistakes’ can you make before it becomes an editorial policy?
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They do seem dim but are they?
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For some reason that escapes me I’m reminded of a tour of Scotland’s National Library me and the missus made a few years ago. Jane was listening as our guide took the two of us around.My eye was caught by a book with the title, “Forty years of Shite”. It was about English football after 1966. It occurred to me that the Scottish version would say, “Thirty nine years of Shite”.
Those figures of death rates, taken along with#Panorama are sobering.
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This is no mistake this is deliberate to mislead the public
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It is certainly grave whether deliberate or not and deserves a retraction and apology.
The only media outlet which seems concerned with comparing similar stats is the Financial Times which very expressly gives figures for hospital beds only. They were the ones who highlighted how bad the UK was compared to France.
I can’t understand how the media in general have such an appalling grasp of elementary science and they demonstrate this on a daily basis. So i am not sure it was deliberate. Not to say that sometimes they slip things in under cover of incompetence.
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