> they pressured her to make the numbers look better
I'm surprised more people don't know how common this is in other states. I have a bunch of anecdotal evidence and articles on both sides of the aisle contending either the numbers are too high or too low - depending on your political affiliation.
This whole COVID affair has been politicized from the outset, which is sad. It feels like the scientific data is being manipulated on both sides to create a political narrative in order to benefit one party or the other.
It looks like politics has overrun the scientific community.
> Americans also estimated that the share of COVID-19 deaths for people between 18 and 24 was 8%"? The fact that we're so misinformed can't be a good thing, can it?
The correct numbers have been available on the CDC website the entire time, unfortunately a lot of people either don’t care or don’t find it useful to memorize those statistics. Not great to see but I think it track’s with the public usually mangling other statistical numbers as well when surveyed.
> A lot of the anger over the government's handling of covid has to do with that. It isn't unreasonable to believe (as I do) that, consequences be damned, the government is obligated to tell the truth and should not lie to get people to act a certain way.
Agree, the fact that so many government leaders spent a year downplaying the danger of the virus and lying to their followers to try to win an election or for other political reasons should make people angry and upset. It’s always sad seeing the stories of someone who was led astray by those leaders and subsequently even refused the vaccine and died of Covid-19 because they had been convinced it was just a common cold that only killed nursing home patients.
> I personally read it as 4 separate readings being shown.
The uncooked data (meaning, total case numbers) are available. Do the math yourself. You'll see you are wrong.
You can also see that of the 34705 people who has a case, 1166 were hospitalized. Of the 321868 people who were fully vaccinated and had a case, 2409 were hospitalized. Ergo, those vaccinated and who get a case are fare less likely to be hospitalized.
> without the raw data
You'll never have access to the rawest of data as that includes personal medical information that isn't supposed to be public.
> We can certainly say that the data is not being provided in a straightforward, accessible way to the public
The government data sources were more straight-forwarded than the interpretations you linked to.
I had no problem with the data, other than it being more technical than I can easily understand.
> we also have unknowns around the data collection
Which is irrelevant to the thesis that those with two shots are more likely to be infected than those with no vaccinations.
Even if the thesis is correct, the analysis purportedly demonstrating the link is clearly wrong.
And the thing about medical data is there will always be unknowns.
> I’m disagreeing that at this moment - and with statistics like excess mortality in NYC, there is very good reason to believe that upward and downward pressure are not equally likely.
I would kinda agree, but for different reasons. I’ve seen the inner workings over several government agencies during this crisis, including a few police departments. What has been obvious to me is that there is a very significant difference from place to place in how death and infection statistics are recorded. My observation has been that people who have an obvious political incentive to record lower numbers usually find a way to do it, and vice versa for people who have an obvious political incentive to record higher numbers. I would agree because across the world, there seems to be greater political incentive to have lower numbers.
Everything you’re speculating about is plausible, and may turn out to be mostly correct. But there is no reasonable basis for the certainty you claim to have. Especially in regards to claims such as there being no potential for factors other than Covid deaths to have a statistically significant influence on overall mortality rates. That’s just your opinion, and it’s a reasonable on to have, but it’s definitely not “almost certainly” true.
According to the research papers and professional groups I've looked as this is true. If you want to discount experts that are well aware of the problems, methodologies, etc., then I don't know how you'll reach any conclusion. Non-experts are rarely more accurate than experts on complex issues.
As to methodology, CDC lists and recommends methodologies for all diseases, and COVID deaths are counted by them using the same methodology that all deaths are, whether cancer, heart attack, car wreck, etc. So there is nothing special about how COVID deaths are counted from their recommendations.
Many states seems to have political pressure to downplay COVID, but I've not seen credible complaints (or any complaints) by whistleblowers claiming they're pressured to increase death counts.
And overall death counts versus expected death counts gives a picture of likely COVID caused deaths that makes them far undercounted.
I expect scientists to arrive at pretty good counts eventually, then political and nonsense spreaders to ignore anything that doesn't suit their narratives.
Here's [1] some CDC covid methodology info - if you google CDC COVID methodology or CDC disease methodology you'll find plenty of methodology on data collection.
>The county reported that it had reviewed each COVID-19 fatality and was only counting those whose cause of death was from the virus and not those who tested positive for COVID-19 at the time of death but did not necessarily die from the virus.
Promoting a conspiracy theory? To what end?
>She also said she believes the lower, newer numbers may actually encourage people to get vaccinated.
> it's increasingly common to lie with statistics.
I'm pretty sure it has always been the case: ""Lies, damned lies, and statistics" can be traced back at least as far as 188x.
Besides, the chain of lies is super long. Sample selection. Data collection. Data analysis. Reporting. Publishing. At each steps, so many things can go wrong: errors, agenda, corruption, bias...
In the case of Covid, we already have plenty of terrible communication from the entities at play, so at this point, it's kinda hard to have an informed opinion.
> But the statistics themself are fact. ex: number of case and hospitalization for vaccinated people vs unvaccinated people.
I wish that as so.
The ‘factual’ statistics can be stretched however one wishes.
For example, what does it mean to be vaccinated? Or, for that matter, what does it mean to ‘hospitalized’? Does it mean Covid symptoms necessitated hospitalization? Or, perhaps, everyone in the hospital who tested positive? Does it include ‘recovered’ patients who, for unrelated reasons, are still in the hospital, albeit no longer in a Covid ward?
Etc.
The statistics for this entire fiasco have been garbage. I wish it were not so.
> But death numbers and hospitalization numbers don't lie.
They most certainly do lie. I know people who work in a particular police department, and they have been exercising a policy of not testing people they find dead. Situations like somebody found dead at home in bed, perhaps some blood that looks like it’s been coughed onto a pillow. Whoever’s in charge of policy wants the numbers lower, so they don’t do a test, and the death is recorded as something non-Covid related. Conversely you have NY who recently decided to declare all cases of death where Covid could have been a plausible cause as Covid-19 deaths. Not only are death statistics reliant on methodology and testing policies, but they are equally as open to manipulation by political actors as the infection statistics are.
This isn’t unique to this situation either. These kinds of statistics are manipulated all the time in lots of different situations. For example you could never smoke a cigarette in your life, but if you manage to die of lung cancer, there’s a reasonably good chance you’ll be recorded in smoking statistics. Then you have things that are even more nebulous, like trying to figure out how many people died as a result of the Chernobyl accident. Lots of different people will try to answer that one for you, and the gap between the lower estimates and the higher estimates is enormous.
> The truth, real truth, is EXTREMELY hard to ascertain
It’s really challenging for me to speak in a way that’s unarguable. For example, instead of saying “COVID is now…”, saying “I read an article that says COVID is now…”.
The first sentence is arguable, the second is unarguable because it’s my personal experience. How often do you read articles or reporting that state unarguable truths?
Even a slight tweak from “COVID cases are spiking…” to “The NY Department of Health released data showing an X% increase in reported COVID cases statewide” makes a lot of difference in how I perceive the potential bias or truthiness of the content I’m reading.
> "This pandemic has been full of hard-to-comprehend numbers."
Alternative explanation "hard-to-comprehend numbers" => "lies". I saved a news clip of the Governor of Hawai'i claiming on prime time news (unquestioned) that Covid had a 10% fatality rate (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1cMdfajHRjvciOkROPDEA...), in August of 2020. The only thing hard-to-comprehend is how so many government leaders could repeat such outright lies over and over again.
It's not that "brains are bad at big numbers", it is that "brains are bad at big lies". When you try to make sense of it you can't, unless you realize that leaders lie and people believe them.
(On the 1M deaths lie: old age and underlying conditions actually caused most of these "Covid deaths")
> I’m frustrated we knew the infection and death rates were exaggerated by faulty PCR testing and financial perks for hospitals impacted by cases they could attribute to COVID.
You can be frustrated without making up claims. Infection and death rates were not exaggerated. Death rates were higher initially due to the ramp up in proper treatment. Infection rates were subject to selection bias which skewed the denominator early on in the pandemic.
You're talking about a difference between a massive number of people dying, and a massive number divided by two dying, and then arguing that a massive number divided by two is not nearly as serious.
Nobody knows what the true numbers will be, but only the rough range they'll be in, so arguing over a factor of two is meaningless. These are terrifying numbers either way.
> If you don't you're just reacting to the latest panic in the news cycle as sadly far too many politicians do.
The "panic" is caused by people finally listening to what epidemiologists have been saying for months. False calm has been far more damaging on this pandemic than panic. If politicians had listened to the panic mongers earlier, the world wouldn't be in this situation.
> "People are still falling ill and filling up hospitals, and these are primarily the unvaccinated"
> Most of the stats claiming this are heavily manipulated
Are you saying the states taking the extraordinary steps of rationing hospital care because of capacity problems don't really have full hospitals but are letting patients die based on manipulated stats? That...is an extraordinary claim that needs some support more than vague handwaving.
> The only data that is somewhat reliable in this pandemic is COVID deaths.
I agree,, especially as you included the word “somewhat”. We have pretty good numbers on people who died in hospitals, but people who died at home appear to be seriously under counted.
Additionally, consequential deaths are currently invisible. These are people who died, say, ecause the coronavirus crowded out their access to hospitals. There’s been a drop in ER visits for things like heart conditions. Some of those people would have recovered fine anyway but some may have arterial blockage that will kill them. You don’t Want these numbers in the primary statistics (as they say nothing about control of the pandemic) but you do want these very hard to track numbers to understating future capacity planning, ethical procedures, and long term economic consequences.
> have been 'substantially' inflating flu death numbers to manipulate public behavior (e.g. to get more people to take vaccinated).
This is the article writer opinion, it is not the CDC official stand on the matter. Similar calculations are currently done for Covid-19. Many articles show the discrepancy between total reported deaths, Covid-19 reported deaths and medium values in previous years. It makes sense.
That the numbers are not perfectly correct does not mean that they are not good enough to use for policies and to inform the public.
> This patronizing behavior from the scientific and political class is destructive.
I like the transparency of publishing the data and the methods to calculate it. That is the contrary of patronizing. I hope that transparency continues to be the norm, even when makes the number easier to criticize for people with little information.
I'm surprised more people don't know how common this is in other states. I have a bunch of anecdotal evidence and articles on both sides of the aisle contending either the numbers are too high or too low - depending on your political affiliation.
This whole COVID affair has been politicized from the outset, which is sad. It feels like the scientific data is being manipulated on both sides to create a political narrative in order to benefit one party or the other.
It looks like politics has overrun the scientific community.
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