This is a good video but guilty of one of my biggest pet peeves of the data analysis of this entire pandemic – not using per capita numbers as a comparator.
Without taking into account per capita numbers and barring some notable outliers (hello Alberta!), of course the most populous provinces are going to be at the top of any graph of Covid-19 numbers.
But using total numbers doesn’t show that, for example, BC which has about five times the population of Saskatchewan, has about the same proportionate number of cases as our much smaller province. On the other hand, Alberta has 80% of the population of BC but more cases overall which would stand out even more if this was comparing numbers using the same scale.
Anyhow, this is neither good nor bad and there are places where using raw numbers is important and times where per capita numbers make sense. But in datasets like this, I think it’s most useful to compare apples to apples.
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