Please, Nate Silver, can we not make the coronavirus about relitigating the 2016 election?

When FiveThirtyEight Editor-in-Chief Nate Silver is not busy getting election predictions wrong, he tweets things such as this largely irrelevant statistical observation about new COVID-19 cases:

“Here’s another interesting comparison,” Silver wrote Wednesday evening. “Yesterday, detected cases increased by 31% in Trump states as compared to 21% in Clinton states.”

“If detected cases in each set of states continue to increase at their current rates, the number of cases in Trump states would surpass the number of cases in Clinton states on 4/11… the day before Easter,” he added. “There is also likely significant underdetection in Trump states. In Trump states that report on hospitalizations, 20% of detected cases are resulting in hospitalizations, compared to 12% in Clinton states (10% without NY). That probably means a lot of mild cases are being missed.”

He might be saying the high growth rate is misleading, or maybe he is trying to say, as others interpreted him, that votes for Trump correlate with the coronavirus. Unfortunately, Silver’s idle speculation about numbers and their connection to politics is part of a rash of idiotic journalism predicated on the fallacy that causation and correlation are the same thing.

A piece in the Raw Story, for example, tried to present Silver’s observation as evidence of the difference “between Democratic and Republican governors’ political responses.” No, probably not. What we can say is that numbers work — states with fewer detected cases have larger percentage increases as testing is finally done. Many of the “Trump states” that have seen sharp increases this week, including West Virginia, Montana, and Indiana, ramped up their testing capacities recently — as have many “Clinton states,” which have reported similar increases in the number of detected coronavirus cases.

But then, even this is a facile, stupid comparison. Note, for example, that Montana has a Democratic governor. So do other “Trump” states such as North Carolina, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Go figure — support for Trump does not even correlate with the party of the executive handling the state response, let alone with the growth in cases of the coronavirus.

The COVID-19 pandemic has already killed 1,000 people in the United States. Maybe, given our very thin understanding of the virus at the moment, this is not the time to use it as an opportunity to relitigate the 2016 U.S. election.

Just maybe.