Pew Research groups tries to fool us: COVID19 edition.

Here's a plot from Pew Research about the average number of deaths by congressional districts from the China virus:

Now let's play guess the headline.  Most sane people would say something like "Republican Districts have about 1/4th of the China Virus deaths that Democrat Districts do".

Now that could be due to things beyond the Democrats control such as densely populated urban districts are more likely to be Democrat.

But the head line Pew used was "Since mid-April, COVID-19 deaths have declined in Democrat districts but have been relatively stable in Republican districts."

For years Pew has used distorted statistics to say that Americans are becoming less religious.  They created a new group, called "nones", which they say account for nearly 20% of Americans. The only problem is that only 3% of Americans, once again according to Pew, are atheists and a few percent more are agnostics.  A large fraction of the "nones" aren't people who don't believe in God but who aren't affiliated with a specific Christian church.

Here's a chart which shows the real contrast between Republican and Democrat control of a state on the impact of coronavirus:

The take away of all of this is that Pew Research Forum isn't to be trusted.