Article content Where would we be without statistics? There are very few news articles that don’t depend on them for the basis of their stories. This was true before the pandemic, but how completely we depend on them has become clear over the last year. We have all become familiar with numbers, graphs and pie charts, and whether you are watching COVID case counts, hospitalizations, ICU admissions, or deaths, the statistics have been up and down, horrifying or hopeful depending on the cycle, or ‘wave.’ The graph is starting to show a slight downward trend in most areas, and many of us are feeling hopeful that the worst is over, but we are cautioned to keep up our guard because we have seen how badly things can go sideways if we are not careful.