Welcome to the Dispatch Podcast.

I'm your host, Sarah Isger.

Join us always by Steve Hayes, Jonah Goldberg, and David French.

Today we'll talk a little bit about China's numbers and what effect those have had on the

American response, and as good politics, always good press.

Finally, we'll look at some of what's going on in those presidential daily press conferences

and then end with a little good news.

Steve, I'll come into you first this week because I want to talk about the numbers, the

modeling, China's numbers, and you're my numbers guy when it comes to all of this stuff.

So perhaps what I'm most curious about your perspective on is we've seen a lot of debates

over when to use per capita numbers and when to use raw numbers.

Do you have strong feelings on this?

Well, I do.

I think per capita numbers generally, if you're doing comparisons, country by country comparisons,

obviously per capita numbers, will give people a better read of relative spread and

an extent of spread, and I think they should be used in that context.

The raw numbers I think aren't entirely useless because they help us understand the growth,

and certainly they can show the exponential growth and it is pretty clear to people.

What I think you can't do is mix the two, and I've seen this CNN had in the same day

in one area used per capita number and then another area used the raw totals, both of

which the way that they were portrayed made the Trump administration look bad.

I don't think you can do that.

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