[barbegal]

Of course it's not worse, these numbers have huge error bars. Statistically the two statistics are not significantly different. But trying to explain that to most people with no knowledge of statistics is tough.

[unreal6]

One would hope that a writer on this subject would have at least a cursory knowledge of statistics

[nukem222]

83 vs 84 percent doesn't seem too difficult to present as "essentially the same". I also don't think this matters much—the result is impressive regardless of alleged rate of change.