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Spanish coronavirus figures and pangolins
00:09:05
Are pangolins the most trafficked animal in the world?
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- [00:01]
A
Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service. We're the programme all about the numbers all around us in the news and in life. And I'm Tim Harford. We've talked before on this program about the dangers of comparing how countries are performing in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic. Differences in how the data are collated mean every country's figures need its own set of footnotes. And these aren't necessarily tiny bits of nitpicking. In the case of Spain, John Byrne Murdoch from the Financial Times has been uncovering some big problems with the numbers.
- [00:35]
B
On Monday the 1st of June and Tuesday the 2nd, they reported 0 new deaths from COVID And not only was that in the data, but a great fanfare was being made of this. The Prime Minister there was hailing this as a huge success. And we were very sceptical of this because only very recently before that, Spain had been recording well over 100 deaths per day, and certainly several dozen. So to suddenly see that precipitous fall to zero for two consecutive days struck us as very odd. And when we then looked more closely at the reports, the PDF that they publish every day with their latest numbers, we saw why that was. And it's because they had this little footnote. It says only deaths where the date of death is the day before the report was written, this daily report was written, only those deaths are being added to the total numbers of deaths on a daily. So just to put that into simpler terms, only in a case where someone had died the day before this report came out would that number be added to their total. So if they died two days before and only on the day before had that death been registered, they still wouldn't be included. So Spain was going through a week. And okay, so on Monday they had no deaths that had occurred on the Sunday, so they didn't record any. And then on Tuesday, no new deaths had occurred on the Monday, and so they didn't report those even if those deaths had later been registered. They just weren't filtering through to the top line number. So for several days they were saying no new deaths, no new deaths. And more importantly, that cumulative total of their death toll wasn't being increased, even though we knew from other reports that on the Sunday and on the Monday in Madrid alone, there had been 11 new deaths and 12 new deaths registered. The point was, because it generally takes more than a day for a new death to be registered, that period through which a death is registered and reported meant that those deaths were all missing. This very strict definition the Spanish were now using to decide whether they report a death at all.
- [02:36]
A
This is extraordinary. So effectively you're saying if it takes you longer than 24 hours to report a death, it's just never going to be counted. We're not going to put it in the figures at all.
- [02:46]
B
Exactly. And I mean, the Spanish have said that they will be doing a revision to this data, which will then include those deaths that had taken longer than 24 hours to be registered and processed, but had come through nonetheless. But they've already missed their own self imposed deadline for when they were going to do that. And so we still see in their very latest data, the latest cumulative number of deaths they have is still only about a dozen higher than it was almost two weeks ago. Yet we know that well over a dozen deaths have occurred in that time period. So the cumulative number is still much lower than we know it to be.
- [03:26]
A
John Byrne Murdoch from the Financial Times. And Spain is far from the only country to come up with creative ways to report their statistics. Brazil currently has more daily deaths than any other nation and the world's second highest number of cases. But last week, the Brazilian Health Ministry stopped releasing cumulative totals for deaths and cases, saying it would now report only those which had occurred in the past 24 hours. Four days later, a judgment from the Supreme Court ordered them to resume the cumulative reporting. You're listening to More or LESS with me, Tim Harford. And as always, our email address is more or lessbc.co.uk. since the start of the pandemic, there have been many theories about how the virus crossed the species barrier from animals to humans. One of the main suspects have been pangolins, the scaly ant eating mammal from Asia and Africa.
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C
The pangolin has spent most of its existence in obscurity, but after a group of Chinese scientists recently labeled them as the potential transmitter of the novel coronavirus, now it's at the center of a PR nightmare.
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A
Pangolins are endangered but are often killed and sold for their meat or scales, which are in some places considered a delicacy and an important part of traditional medicine. That's what prompted loyal listener John Guy to email more or lessbc.co.uk, to ask.
- [04:58]
B
During the last four years or so, I've read many claims that pangolins are the most trafficked animal on Earth. Where did this seam originate and how was it calculated?
- [05:10]
A
This year, a report from the UN Office of Drugs and Crime called pangolins arguably the world's most heavily trafficked wild mammal. But if you try and find a source for that claim, you're connected to a lot of links that simply assert exactly the same thing without any evidence. Dr. Richard Thomas works for the charity Traffic, which aims to prevent wildlife trading. He says that judging from the illegal products which get caught, there are a significant number of pangolins killed for their meat and scales.
- [05:40]
D
We know of up to around 20 tons of pangolins. Parts are intercepted, seized by usually customs officers each year, and that represents tens of thousands of animals.
- [05:53]
A
But if you're only looking at animal parts, it's sometimes hard to know how many animals they came from. While that might be relatively straightforward with something like elephant tusks, it's much tougher with a ton of pangolin scales. So if you're estimating that 20 tons of pangolin scales are being smuggled, that's a pretty grim question. But what is that in terms of pangolins?
- [06:17]
D
Basically, you have to take a representative box, take a known weighed amount out of that, and then count the individual scales within it. So say you took a 200 gram sample and counted how many scales were within that. You could then times that up and work out roughly how many scales there were in the entire consignment. And then there's a conversion table, because the different species of pangolins, you have different numbers of scales. With the smallest number of scales, one of the African species, that has typically around 380 scales, right up to the Philippine pangolin, that has sometimes more than a thousand scales on it. With that knowledge, and if you know the species involved, which is often possible, you can then do that conversion and try and work out how many animals it actually equates to. And we believe over a 15 year period or so, somewhere approaching a million pangolins have been seized from international trade. And presumably that international trade is only a fraction of the total that's taking place.
- [07:23]
A
In Contrast, traffic estimates 758 tigers and around 300,000 African elephants were poached between the year 2020and 2015. Richard says the data show pangolins are the most trafficked mammal. But even greater numbers apply to things you may not ever have thought of.
- [07:44]
D
When people think of wildlife trade, they do automatically think about the animals that are in trade. But actually, if you look at all the wild resources that are traded internationally, by far and away, the major ones are timber, which is easily the largest commodity. The value of timber exports and imports worldwide runs into the billions of dollars. Fire eclipses the value of the rest put together, followed by fisheries.
- [08:10]
A
But there is some good news for our scaly little friends. Whether the pangolins link to COVID 19 is real or not, it might just have its advantages.
- [08:19]
D
We've already heard reports of pangolins no longer being bought up in markets in Gabon in West Africa, for example, that they're no longer in demand there. Whether that will become more of a long term change in attitude remains to be seen.
- [08:38]
A
Dr. Richard Thomas, this year, Pangolin scales were removed from a list of ingredients approved for use in traditional Chinese medicine. That is all we have time for this week, but if you have a question about a number in the news, email us at. More or lessbc co. More or Less was produced by Jordan Dunbar and Kate Lamble. Our studio engineer is James Beard, our editor, Richard Varden. And I'm Tim Harford.