Many doubt the ‘scientific reliability’ of the human sciences, as they differ drastically to the natural sciences where a proof for hypotheses is often in the form of exact data and evidence, social sciences often extract only data from a relative group of people to the entire population. They thus can only use models and graphs to represent the situation. This method causes a lot of problems.

One example of this is the recent events of the COVID-19 Coronavirus, which heavily involves the study of social geography, human migration, general health, etc. Many nations, except for China, being ground zeros of the outbreak, had a low initial number of confirmed infections, but over time, as the situation escalates, suddenly sees a significant rise in the number of infections. From this process, we can see the flaws of the methods of the human sciences. Due to the practice of social sciences not being able to test infections on the entire population, a large group of infected is not tested on and therefore ignored by the initial numbers. But as the death count rises, a gap is formed between the infected and the dead. The errors start to be recognized.

This is why currently, both Italy and Korea have relatively higher death rates than China, as China has tested for the virus on a much more significant percentage of the population to gain relatively accurate numbers. In contrast, Italy and Korea have counted deaths but ignores a large amount of hidden infected. America, just yesterday, had seen a rise in infection count and, with over 100 thousand infected, is now the country most severely affected by the Coronavirus. This situation is due to the officials recognizing the importance of gaining accurate data, and conducted tests for infection on a large percentage of the population, finding those that were infected but not confirmed before and listing them on the data, thus the sudden rise in numbers.

From this very recent example, I believe that is can once again be seen how the methods behind human sciences can be quite skeptical at times. However, these errors cannot disprove the importance of these studies to human beings. Business and economics are relevant to all our lives as long as we actively act as consumers to cooperations, and Geography has proven to be important situations such as recently. Like humans ourselves, it is flawed but of importance.