Logical Reasoning

PT138 · S4 · Q5 Recent epidemiological studies report

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Recent epidemiological studies report that Country X has the lowest incidence of disease P of any country.

Given that

Country X has the lowest reported incidence of disease P of any country.

Why is it that

Residents of Country X who are reported to have disease P are much more likely to die from it than residents of any other country?

Evaluate

Two statistics about one disease in one country point in opposite directions. Few people get it, but the people who get it die at a high rate.

Is Country X good at avoiding disease P, but inept at treating it? Do they get hit with a strain that is less contagious, but more deadly?

Goal

Find the answer that provides some distinction about Country X that would allow us to explain why the residents who report getting P are much more likely to die from it than those in other countries?

Which one of the following, if true, most helps to resolve the apparent discrepancy described above?

There are several forms of
No Impact
This answer provides no distinction about Country X, so it's a non-starter. But even if it did, at best, this fact could explain the background fact of why X has a lower incidence of the disease than elsewhere (maybe they have the less contagious version). But contagiousness only affects how many people catch the disease, not how many die once they have it.
3% picked this
Most of the fatal cases
No Impact
The surprising statistic is specifically about residents of Country X. People visiting Country X who happen to die of P while they're there would not count among the statistic of "residents of X who are reported to have contracted P". Since this answer doesn't even talk about those residents, it couldn't explain their higher rate of death.
3% picked this
Correct
In Country X, diagnosis of
Why this is right
This ends up being a Reporting vs. Incidence type of resolution. Since you wouldn't report that you had a disease unless you were diagnosed with that disease, this answer leads us to think that in country P, the only people who would be reporting that they have contracted P would be people with the most severe cases of the disease. That would explain why this group has such a high rate of death. This also explains why the reports of the overall incidence of disease P are lower than those of other countries: P is only diagnosing / reporting the super severe cases, so it's very much under-counting how much its residents have disease P. If the U.S. only counted covid cases based on who showed up to the hospital needing help, they would be massively undercounting the number of people whose covid is too mild to require hospital treatment -- and the mortality rate of covid would seem really high, because lots of people hospitalized for it end up dying from it. Is this answer providing a distinction about Country X? Not explicitly, but often on Paradox they'll be asking us to make a common sense inference that something kinda weird (like "only diagnose the most severe cases") is more of an outlier trait than a typical trait. Additionally, the best available answer might just give us a possible story to tell, even if doesn't do much to guarantee that it is true. This answer doesn't guarantee us that "unlike other countries, X only reports the worst cases of P", but it at least gives us a story to tell for why X's death rate for disease P is worse than others'.
Skill tested: Paradox · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.
87% picked this
The number of cases of
No Impact
Year-to-year swings in case counts would affect every country and say nothing about why Country X's reported cases are unusually deadly. .
0% picked this
Because of its climate, more
Irrelevant Causality
This is offering a distinction about Country X that does relate to an illness being potentially deadly. But this is a statistic about whether or not a disease occurs within a country. We already know that disease occurs in X as well as elsewhere. We're trying to compare the death rates of people with reported cases of P in all the countries where P occurs. This wouldn't help us do that. It's just saying that country X has a higher number of life threatening illnesses than other countries do. It provides no way to explain why their cases of P are more deadly than other places that have cases of P.
7% picked this

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