Tom Frieden, 2020

“Collected, analyzed, and disseminated correctly, data can save lives and help restore livelihoods.”

Tom Frieden made this statement in a June 2020 media briefing about the interpretation of pandemic data. Vital Strategies and Resolve to Save Lives preserve the sentence in their accounts of the event. Frieden, a former director of the US CDC, warned that numbers attracting attention could be incomplete or misleading. The quotation identifies three kinds of work needed before information becomes useful: obtaining it, interpreting it, and communicating it. Its context was an urgent public health crisis, but its logic extends to quieter decisions about services and prevention. An organization can possess a large amount of information without having a reliable explanation of what that information means. The statement places the benefit in a careful process, rather than in the existence of a dashboard or the size of a database.

The word about correctness carries much of the sentence’s weight. A count needs a definition, a time period, and an understanding of what was missed. A comparison needs to consider whether the things being compared were measured in the same way. Communication needs to make those limits visible enough that readers do not mistake an estimate for a complete inventory. Frieden’s briefing used pandemic examples to show how an isolated indicator can fail to capture the situation it appears to describe. This is a reason to ask what question a measure can answer and what additional information is needed. It also distinguishes uncertainty from uselessness. A number with known limitations may still inform a decision, provided those limitations remain part of the interpretation. Greater precision in presentation cannot repair a weakness in collection, and a correct calculation cannot compensate for a poorly chosen measure.

Consider a health service reporting that its average waiting time has fallen. That may reflect an improvement, but the average alone leaves several questions unanswered. Were the same kinds of appointments counted? Were people who abandoned the booking process included? Did some groups continue to experience long waits while others gained quicker access? This example applies the quotation’s principle; it is not an episode described in Frieden’s briefing. Answering these questions would help an organization decide what to do next and explain its results honestly. It might also reveal that a celebrated improvement had overlooked an important part of the service. The sentence offers a standard for public communication as much as for analysis. Readers should be able to understand what a measure represents without needing access to every technical detail. A clear account can identify the scope, the uncertainty, and the decision under consideration. Data become useful through that connection between evidence and action. The potential to benefit health does not excuse shortcuts in the work that gives a number its meaning.