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Day 121: COVID-19 Why Are States Obscuring the Data?
The screengrab above is from the Vermont Department of Health Weekly Summary of Vermont COVID-19 Data. It makes quite clear how residents of long-term care facilities are the majority of deaths from COVID-19 in that state. Similarly, the following chart illustrates the same thing, just adding that “Health Settings” include not only hospitals and long-term care, but therapeutic centers and behavioral health institutions as well.
Contrast Vermont’s data clarity with that of Minnesota. Although it is reported that 81% of Minnesota’s deaths occurred among residents of long-term care facilities, that is not easily demonstrated by the Minnesota Department of Health’s Stay Safe MN website. First, the only data that mention long-term care facilities is “case data,” not “death data.” Second, what death data there is is only disaggregated by race and ethnicity, not any other factors:
Congregant living?
Are LTC and Residential Behavioral Health “Non-Hospitalized?”
No correlation of deaths to anything other than race and ethnicity. Why is it important to correlate death to race and ethnicity, but not to residence in long-term care?
Of course, Minnesota is not alone in obscuring the relationship between infections in long-term care facilities and death. But why? When the data suggests that just getting your long-term care facilities infection control protocols in place would have reduced your deaths from COVID-19 by 80%, why wouldn’t you focus your energy there rather than house arrest for all residents? I get it that if you have a lot of infected but asymptomatic or minimally ill people going about, there is a greater challenge in protecting the residents of the long-term care facilities. But how is it less costly to impact the livelihoods of tens of millions rather than treat long-term care facilities more like Level 4 Bio labs?
The New York and Florida situations have been contrasted with regard to, in the one case, introducing infections into long-term care facilities, and in the other, putting emphasis on protecting residents of long-term care facilities as compared to other broader societal restrictions. As Texas Governor Greg Abbott tweeted, there does seem to be some correlation between the governing philosophies and the epidemic outcomes:
The first thing is focusing your efforts on the vulnerable, not controlling the whole of your society. Maybe you are obscuring the data so that it doesn’t make clear the consequences of your governing philosophy?
[Note: Links to all my COVID-19 posts can be found here.]
Published in General
Definitely. I think leaders at the federal and state levels initially panicked, and rather than say they had (understandably) formed the wrong impression of who was the most vulnerable, now they are trying to justify their draconian lockdown actions after the fact.
So, when they say that a death occurred at a nursing home or a long-term care facility, presumably they are not including the people who were transported from those facilities and ultimately ended up dying in the hospital. Also, there are likely a great many in this demographic who are DNR.
I think the “nursing home death” rate is probably far larger than 50%.
Yet… we’re still being told to stay home, to socially distance, and to wear masks.
This thing didn’t just attack nursing homes. It’s not going around specifically seeking out nursing homes while avoiding the rest of the population. It seems likely that sars2 is essentially dying out when left to run through the general population, but that it tends to thrive in the nursing home environment. In a sane world, we would do something with that information.
I’ve wondered too about the political pursuit of race and ethnicity regarding this virus. It doesn’t seem that politicians are too worried about the larger number of men dying from it.
The pot stirrers of media and political opportunism is where most of the danger lies. I wouldn’t put it past any of them to lie, cheat and steal to end up on top of this. That is the controlling personality’s way of dealing with adversity. Charisma and denial at the left’s two main weapons. Their motive is power.
In AZ the state data site, which is otherwise excellent, does not allow you to find long-term care information separately. However, Maricopa County (Phoenix metro) with 60% of the state population not only breaks out long-term resident cases and deaths but separately accounts for long-term staff cases and deaths. As of today, 73% of fatalities are in long-term care and the % has been increasing over the past month. Some of the worst outbreaks have been in assisted living, not nursing homes, so relatively speaking healthier people in these facilities.
Unfortunately, Gov Abbott’s tweet, by avoiding per capita analysis, utilizes the same trick that CNN and the NY Times deploy. On a per capita basis, California is almost identical to Florida and much, much closer to Texas than it is to NY.
Morality Rate? Oh well, sweet chart anyway. Hope he adds unemployment rate next month.
The heck with Minnesota….how many times has CNN mentioned that 40% of deaths are in LTC facilities versus how often have they implied that young people are at grave risk?
Fairness and inclusivity are very important to the people on the left. So, instead of targeting programs like Social Security and Medicare toward elderly people who are poor, we must include everyone. Because a few children learn reading better via the look-say method of instruction, all children must be taught by that method, even though most are more easily taught with phonetics. Because it’s unfair that not all parents can choose their children’s schools, no parent should be allowed to choose. Because it’s unfair to treat people who are susceptible to COVID differently from those who aren’t, everyone must be quarantined.
There are several states in the northeast known as the home of the Ivy League universities which attaches a certain elite reputation to those locales. Are people there now brain dead. The ruling elites there have figured out how to maximize death from Covid-19 during the shutdown.
Michigan lists long term care cases by county and facility. But I can’t find any death counts. The mayor of Detroit was quoted in a newspaper article as saying 1/3 of the casualties were from nursing homes.
This should not have surprised anyone who ever had a loved one in a home. Flu season usually always includes at least some isolation and restricted visitation in normal times.
I did not realize until a week ago, that homes were forced to take in COVID patients. Defies any logic.
In all fairness to our nation’s leaders, initially we were relying on statistics from foreign countries. Clearly, for many reasons, many of those statistics were not transposable to the United States. Also, it is a debilitating disease with a long recovery time. I have listened to YouTube talks by Tom Hanks and a new one (it’s hilarious) by Tony Shalhoub (our beloved Mr. Monk–my kids loved this new video), and both actors made an effort to appear well, the reason for which in Shalhoub’s video did not become clear until the end, because they both had had the disease. They wanted people to feel hopeful and encouraged if they should get it, which is why they sounded so upbeat, but they also mentioned that it was a long and difficult recovery.
This is a bad bug. It’s good to be working on a vaccine. It’s not worthy of shutting down the U.S. economy, but it’s a bad bug.
But we do do something with that information: We put out a headline about a healthy 20-year-old who died from Covid.
@marcin that is an excellent point. No one should want to take a turn on the dance floor with this virus whether they have known vulnerabilities or not. But shutting down the US economy is so much worse. It should not come as a surprise that people who believe you can centrally manage an economy would not be in the least disturbed with shutting it down, because they believe it can be miraculously resurrected by command as well. The are either clueless or evil. They are never as smart as they think they are. Which explains why so many progressives believe they are immune from the evident end state consequences of progressive policies.
Rodin, others have said this, but it bears repeating that you are providing us a valuable service by researching and posting information on the virus and authorities’ reactions to it. It is very helpful to us in forming our own perspectives on this most unusual challenge that affects us all. Thank you.
Rodin, this actually is a very important post.
If our Health Care authorities were at all concerned about ending this pandemic, they would have long ago at least isolated those cases of people who died in nursing homes and related facilities and identified why, since it appears now that a high percentage of the deaths from COVID-19 come from residents of these facilities. Then one could at least begin to get some rational analysis of what is really going on among the general population versus that of the high risk in nursing homes and from that analysis we might be able to come up with some rational solutions.
But noooooo, such an analysis shall not be done obviously since such an analysis might uncover a horrible truth that certain Democratic governors dramatically increased the death toll with their policies that among other things took recovering COVID-19 patients from hospitals to nursing homes where they infected the very vulnerable high risk residents there and the staff.
Why are the Thai physicians who put out the Thai medical newsletter torn between laughing and crying at the situation here in the USA, and our policies with regards to COVID?
Why is there no punishment for the hospital admins who ignored the Navy hospital ship Trump sent to NYC harbor, so infected elderly could be housed and treated separately from those who were uninfected? Instead hospital admins pushed infected elderly into the wards of nursing homes where the disease had not, until then, affected people. These admins should be hanging from lampposts!
Here people are dying because we do not have doctors who prophalactically administer HCQ. There the Thai people have it in their medicine cabinets as back up, due to Thailand having malaria.
Why do all roads inside the Global Medical Mafiosa lead back to Bill Gates? Why is his proxy Dr Dzau on so many advisory boards and is influential inside the World H Org, as well as various other influential organizations? (If you are given to enjoy provocative youtubes, start paying attention to Amazing Polly – she is a phenomena in her own right.)
Lastly:
Yup. If we were honest about the numbers, we would acknowledge that for people under 70, this is considerably less deadly than the common flu. For people over 70, there is a wide range. Heck, even for people above 80.
And, if we were honest about these facts, we would have ditched this idea of “social distancing” a long time ago, and we would be encouraging healthy people to go out and mingle. Problem is, we are still only doing baby-math. We are good at running simple numbers with no variables. So, we say that for herd immunity, we need to have 70-80% infection. We are only at 2 or 3% in many areas. So, we take the number of deaths and multiply by the percentage increase, and bang! We get to the “millions of deaths before herd immunity” number and declare that this would be tantamount to murder. Of course, we don’t consider the demographics involved. We don’t consider that we can still protect nursing homes and long term care facilities. We also don’t consider that “herd immunity” isn’t exactly what we’re looking for in the traditional sense. No known coronaviruses behave in that manner.
So we are still banging this drum – and it has become an extremely violent and loud banging the last few weeks – of social distancing, masks, etc… as if somehow we’re just going to stop this stupid virus dead in its tracks. That will never happen as long as we continue down this road.
I have a really difficult time believing that there are not very smart people out there pursuing that very line. With Sars1, from which we are apparently choosing to learn no lessons, and which died out with far less infection than the 70% cited by most people, somebody found that there was a correlation between infection and standing water in drains… that means somebody was taking a look at cases and attempting to connect threads, in the classic Sherlock Holmes method of problem solving.
With Sars2, we have a hell of a lot of “clues,” so to speak. We have nursing homes and dense urban areas, and a whole lot of data to look at. But, for some reason, all we’re doing is allowing social media crazes to drive our response. Some doofuses on the internet look at South Korea and say “damn – South Korea is doing well and they’re all wearing masks and letting the government track their every move with invasive cellphone technology. Let’s do what they’re doing!”
What ever happened to intelligent problem solving?
Intelligent problem solving is not something the Dems really want to have occur.
Of course there is always the old canard about whether so much of what has gone on is ignorance or an evil planned out event.
When Gutfeld on Fox talked about the empty Navy hospital ship sitting in NYC harbor at the same time infected COVID elderly were pushed out of the hospital system and into nursing homes, i started to opt for the later of the two scenarios.
I hate to be the “well, in my experience” guy … but I have generally found that the simplest explanation virtually always ends up being the correct one. I shy away from conspiracy theories not because conspiracies don’t exist, but because they do exist, and I’ve seen them, and I know how easily and quickly they fail. With this, I have no doubt that the media is guided by its biases, as are virtually all politicians involved. Also, our response to this virus seems to be driven primarily by social media. People don’t ask questions, they just see other people doing things and assume that there must be a good reason. Information is spread through incredibly unreliable forms of media, and all of these fads (“conventional wisdom”) take on lives of their own. Then, when people actually do start asking questions, the polarization that we’ve developed over the past 2 decades kicks in and our response is largely tribalistic.
https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1545C_dJWMIAgqeLEsfo2U8Kq5WprDuARXrJl6N1aDjY/mobilebasic?fbclid=IwAR392UiOOU5AHwUdPjqUGegC5jde86QRHAl2hEU97n9CIvnOZ7CyxSdaZZg
The HCQ-AZ combination, when started immediately after diagnosis, appears
to be a safe and efficient treatment for COVID-19, with a mortality rate of
0.5%, in elderly patients. It avoids worsening and clears virus persistence
and contagious infectivity in most cases.
22 August 2005
CDC Special Pathogens Branch
MJ VIncet, E.Bergon, S. Benjannet, BR Erickson, Pierre Rollin, T.G. Ksiazek, NG Seidah,ST Nichole. Chloroquine is a potent inhibitor of SARS coronavirus infection and spread. Virology Journal. (2005) 2: 69
Chloroquine has strong antiviral effects on SARS CoV infection of primate cells in tissue culture.
These inhibitory effects are observed when cells are treated with the drug either before or after exposure to the virus, suggesting both prophylactic preventative and treatment use. The paper describes three mechanisms by which the drug might work and suggest it may have both a prophylactic and therapeutic role in Coronavirus infections. (Full; study at link above.)
……………………………………………………………………………………….
But let’s ignore the above and instead put elderly people into hospitals Once there let’s deprive them of HCQ with zinc, forbid their family members from visiting, and intubate them, even though inductive reasoning by now would inform medical personnel that intubation itself with COVID has a 85 to 95% mortality rate.
If any elderly do survive their hospital visit, let’s put them into an elder care facility, where others can be infected. Because obviously the Navy hospital ships sent to both NY and LA harbors were not really good for anything, because after all, “Trump sent them.”
I very much doubt that Fauci said either of these things. I may be wrong. If you have evidence of it, I’d appreciate links.
They are doing vaccine studies now. I have no idea if anyone is doing HCQ studies. It would sure be nice if they did.
The HCQ effectiveness question should have been answered a good month ago, if only a few of those alleged thousands of doctors using HCQ had been bothered to do a decent study.
I also would need evidence that he said these things. It is interesting to hear from patients who were well into severe symptoms for days with the virus but not yet hospitalized who make statements of serious improvements within hours of starting the HCQ regime. It is also very questionable that those in the veterans hospital trial frequently referenced by the media were in advanced stages of Covid-19, not a condition supporting the use of the HCQ regime in the opinion of those who support its use, and the fact that some of those patients died is being used by critics as evidence that the use of HCQ is dangerous as if that use contributed to the deaths. Just too much misinformation out there motivated by anti-Trump sentiments. It is really astounding.
I can see both sides. It is unlikely that Fauci actually said those things, and his picture on that meme is a bit misleading. The underlying premise, though, with respect to popular sentiments, remains: HCQ was slammed by a media that hates Trump; social distancing and masks (and so forth) have been recommended and even mandated, in spite of very little evidence for their need, same with lockdowns. These same people are full steam ahead with respect to vaccines.
There is a great deal of inconsistency with respect to actions taken by our governors, and actions supported both popularly and in the media. We have moved from actually trying to get a grip on this thing to a sort of group-think mentality, and we have reverted to our extremely polarized and tribalistic behavior. In some sense, that is good news. People don’t have those petty fights when their lives are actually in danger and they are fearful.
This virus is much less deadly than initially believed. It is largely confined to very specific demographics and locations, and people are very slowly starting to figure that out. Governors continue to wield an extremely clumsy and over-sized sledge hammer, in spite of all evidence showing that it is unnecessary and harmful. Panic has waned, and we have reverted to partisan fighting. If we were talking only about social trends, rather than governors’ edicts, I would think of that as very good news. As it stands, unfortunately, the rule of law has essentially been suspended, so we cannot simply roll our eyes and move on.
I agree. I think this definitely plays into the decision to keep the data rather murky.
Unfortunately this virus and the way it has inserted the Global Medical Mafia into every aspect of our lives makes it all the more likely that the Left will get their way. People in Calif are now so scared out of their wits that even some people who depend on their small businesses to be up and running are saying “I can’t ask my employees to endanger themselves.”
I am beginning to doubt we will have elections. For if people are willing to starve rather than to find out the truth about COVID 19 – that for many places in the nation, it has less than a 0.02 % mortality rate, and that makes it less effective at killing people than the 1968 influenza outbreak, I believe the public will be too afraid to be going to the polling places in early Nov is (At least in Calif.)
Public Health is one of the most SJW converged educational fields in the country. The Association of Schools and Programs for Public Health outlines core competencies it wants graduates of approved programs to have.
The “Diversity and Culture” competency is defined as:
Programs are expected to train students to:
The “Professionalism” competency is definedas:
The “Systems Thinking” competency is defined as:
Programs are expected to train students to:
I have no doubt my state is hiding data.
Today, I got access to the state Department of Health AWS data, which supposedly has everything.
At the state level, I can get total number of cases by age range, cases by sex, and cases by ethnicity. But no breakdown on deaths at all.
But the ethnicity breakdown is quite interesting. These are all of the categories the state records:
So, 774 white people in the entire state have contracted this, and we’ve been on lockdown for two months. That makes so much sense.
I’m open to the idea of banning public health.
We’ve got a little list
They never will be missed
That’s what Bill Gates WANTS you to think, and once you’re imprinted with 5G -ink vaccine markers you WILL think it. /s
Agreed. The media has fallen almost entirely on the Doom Scenario Endorsement side. Why? I think they are more likely to assume expertise = wisdom and credentials = infallibility. When we do stories we call people who know things and we would rather quote the person who got the degree than the person who’s just spitballing. This is natural; we can’t be experts in everything. We can hardly be experts in anything, except our beats, and even then we regard the credentialed class as authoritative.
When you add reflexive Trump detestation and equally reflexive affirmation of Democrat politicians – because they’re smart and guided by cool, rational science, and care about people – you get an investment in a particular line of thought that has the added benefit of being vocally opposed by the Yahoo Rube demographic. Add a dash of altruism – I’m trying to save lives! By saying things! – and you have a way of thinking that is remarkably impervious to additional information. Unless it confirms your priors.
At the start of the pandemic we were told several things: this thing is wickedly contagious, you can get it so easily; it’s not just a bad bug but a really really really bad horrible bug for most people who get it (here’s a marathon runner who DIED), and it is everywhere. Maintaining the lockdowns requires all three things to be true, for as long as necessary.
Please excuse what may be a dumb question, but could someone point me to the actual studies that determined not just that asymptomatic spread is possible, but that it is common, and that it is a statistically significant contributing factor with respect to transmission?
This seems to be taken for granted to the point that I virtually never see it actually discussed.