Manipulated data? - Printable Version
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Manipulated data? - BostonCard - 12-16-2020
[tweet]https://twitter.com/JudLounsbury/status/1339341333744537605?s=20[/tweet]
Unfortunately, the article is behind a paywall, so I don't know the details, but the allegations are pretty bad.
BC
RE: Manipulated data? - M T - 12-16-2020
If you find that article (search for "Mystery gap") in Google News, you can click on it and read it. But if I go back to the same URL, I can't. (So, I found the Google News link in my history and clicked on it.)
Good golly, everything's a conspiracy! To give you an idea of the approach of the newspaper, this is part of their article: "DeSantis and his administration have engaged in a pattern of secrecy and spin, ..."
The fact that all this is based on is "Florida stopped including long-backlogged deaths in its daily counts on Oct. 24, 10 days before the Nov. 3 election, and resumed consistently including them on Nov. 17, two weeks after the election." It is also a fact that at no point before the election were fewer deaths reported than actually happened on that day (per the possibly incomplete data presented in the article). The most negative discrepancy was 4 (42 reported on a day when 46 happened) on Nov 6.
I thought this was the key: "The change came just three days after the administration of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced that it would conduct an additional review of every suspected COVID death before adding it to Florida’s count." Ask yourself, why was the governor's name there? Go back and reread that -- he didn't announce it.
I think we all understand that if there is an additional review before acceptance of data, then naturally it will get paused. It wasn't clear to me whether these old deaths that paused being added were "suspected COVID deaths" (see quote above) working their way through a review, when an extra review got added. I would describe them as "reported COVID deaths that were being called into doubt".
It depends upon the motivation of that change. If that change came out of the blue, then maybe that should be explained. But it didn't.
The article does go into that a bit:
Aug 15: County medical officers had been swamped by the deaths and were falling behind determining whether a death was COVID related. They asked that attending doctors be allowed to make that determination and report it to the state. That was allowed by the state.
Oct 13: The Rep. House Speaker argued that these reports were lacking in rigor and were undermining the completeness & reliability of the records.
Oct 21: The Florida surgeon general announced that the office would review these, "saying many deaths took place more than a month before being reported or months after the person tested positive for COVID-19."
The graph with the article is perhaps not the whole truth. It runs Sep. 1 - Dec 9 and shows (1) deaths-by-date-of-death and (2) deaths-by-date-reported, where for virtually all of Sep 1 to Oct 18, the number (2) is maybe 140% of (1). For Oct 12, there were 54 deaths but 106 reports were reported. The graph doesn't show that data back in August or even July when (1) had to be much higher than (2).
(Note that the article's "deaths-by-date-of-death" is dependent upon all those reports being filed. If the reports haven't all been filed, reviewed, and reviewed further, then I wonder whether the "deaths-by-date-of-death" is accurate. They show such data through last week. But, hey, it's a line in a graph in a news article, so it must be right, right? When you eyeball the line over time, or the difference between reported and (alleged) numbers, remember that line is likely incomplete data that will grow.)
Hey, conspiracy theories get clicks. Clicks get dollars. Dollars feed the machine.
RE: Manipulated data? - BostonCard - 12-16-2020
Thank you for digging into it for me. This is why I wish the article hadn't been behind a paywall. The graph was pretty striking, but the temporal correlation looks to be coincidental.
Over the long term, the number of deaths by date reported should equal the number of deaths by date of death. Over the time period in the graph, however, more deaths were reported than were happening, which I guess represents the backlog from the summer surge. It still looks like at one point 50 more deaths were being reported daily than new deaths were happening.
BC