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Showing posts from March, 2020

False Equivalence in the Time of COVID 19

What is a false equivalence? Politicians and many journalists uses it. It is basically comparing apples and oranges. Both are fruits but not the same. In more formal definition, the false equivalence is “a logical fallacy in which an equivalence is drawn between two subjects based on flawed or false reasoning” (Ref: Wikipedia) The daily press conference done by President Trump on March 23, 2020 had examples of false equivalence. He tried to downplay the very realistic possibility of devastating impact of COVID 19 with the road accidents to prove his political point. But the problem in this false equivalence example is that COVID 19 is killing people faster everyday and on a near vertical trajectory pointing to many order of magnitude of mortality than car crashes cause each year. This is comparIng apples and oranges. If the near vertical rise of the curve is not hammered down, and the virus gets more opportunities to spread freely, the direct death toll will be enormous, causing

Strange and Dangerous Time

We are going through strange and dangerous time. The very real threat of COVID-19, the alarming speed of its spread and the steeply rising number of deaths, have forced many developed and developing nations taking  urgent and emergency measures. In front of a seemingly unstoppable virus,  invisible but deadly, the very raw fear in every human beings have come up to the surface. To defeat the highly transmissible virus like COVID-19 stringent measures like the strict social distancing is necessary. Governments of the world need to be flexible to deploy all available and innovative measures to win this war against the mighty virus.  Among people, from Canada to US to Mexico to Brazil to Italy to Germany to France to Spain to UK to Egypt to South Africa to Bangladesh to Indonesia to Australia, people of every nations are terrified of the grim possibility of an uncontrolled virus stamping out our precious livelihood, our very existence. The colourful graphs showing the near vertical r