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The #economist is publishing a regularly-updated model of excess deaths due to COVID, which is being used to tell just-so stories about countries the Economist doesn’t like. Let’s talk about the dangers of using machine learning for analysis when you don’t have data. 
Before we do, let’s just take a moment to appreciate the deep racism of this picture from a report using the Economist's numbers by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies. When you see a cover pic like this, you can guess what the contents are gonna be.
Having seen who is using this data and hazarded a wild guess at why, let’s look at some results. First, let’s compare the UK and Vietnam. According to the Economist, Vietnam had nearly as many excess deaths due to COVID-19 as the UK, despite containing the virus for a year.
