As Mark Twain once said, "there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics." Here's a thread that looks at Premier Kenney's claim that the international border testing pilot program of air travellers has been a "success." #ableg
At his Jan. 1 presser, Kenney noted the the pilot program had a test positivity rate of 1.48% compared to an overall positivity rate from testing done in the province of about 7%. See video link at approximately 3:15:
Indeed, Kenney's numbers for the pilot project are accurate. Of the 18,021 travellers who had participated as of December 17, 1.48% had tested positive after arriving in
But was it appropriate to compare the results among travellers who were presumably screened before boarding and found asymptomatic to those from recent testing results among Albertans who are overwhelming if not entirely symptomatic or have had a known contact with the disease?
Perhaps, it would have been better if Kenney had compared those results to those done among similarly asymptomatic Albertans. As @CBCFletch noted in an October 23 tweet, 659,000 tests among people with no symptoms found a positivity rate of just 0.11%....