I know, we're not undercounting, we're overcounting, goes the narrative. Also amusing that republicans and democrats are split on this, because instead of actually considering the logic, they have to make it a partisan issue. Christ. https://dailycaller.com/2020/05/11/...numbers-cases-cdc-white-house-meeting-report/ Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus task force response coordinator, believes some official COVID-19 statistics like death tolls may be inflated by up to 25%, a new report states. Birx criticized the method the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was using to collect its data during a heated task force meeting, according to a report Saturday from The Washington Post. (RELATED: FLASHBACK: Jan.21: Fauci Says Coronavirus ‘Not A Major Threat’ To U.S.) “There is nothing from the CDC that I can trust,” Birx reportedly told CDC Director Robert Redfield. Birx told The Post in a statement that “mortality is slowly declining each day,” and that the focus should be on protecting Americans who are older or have pre-existing health conditions that make them vulnerable to the virus. “To keep with this trend, it is essential that seniors and those with comorbidities shelter in place and that we continue to protect vulnerable communities,” Birx reportedly said. Two-thirds of Americans also doubt official coronavirus numbers, according to an Axios poll published earlier in May. The poll found that 40% of Republicans believe the number of deaths are being overcounted, compared to 24% who believe they are being undercounted. On the other side of the aisle, just 7% of Democrats believe the number of deaths are being overcounted, compared to 63% who believe they are being undercounted. Concerns over the way death tolls were being counted emerged after New York added 4,000 people who had never tested positive to its official count overnight. The CDC later confirmed that they were including “probable” cases of the virus in its official counts, potentially adding thousands of people who never tested positive to official death tolls. Official death tolls from certain diseases can often take years to accumulate, and the CDC studies death certificates to estimate death tolls for diseases.
I will trust the doctors who say they are being pressured to count each death as Corona Virus related. Doctors have no financial incentive to lie but, hospitals who get higher reimbursement rates for Corona Virus related deaths? What about political hacks of the CDC who want to be relevant after all, they might ax their cushy jobs if they become irrelevant? Now, that is too obvious. They can audit the figures too and see how many were falsely, counted as Corona Virus.
First we had to stay closed until the curve flattened. Then it was stay closed until we had a vaccine. Why don't they just come out and say they want us to stay closed until Biden wins?
Well the Democrat governors formed an alliance to unite on when they will open their states economies. It is all a political ploy to damage the US economy and President Donald Trump's re-election chances. Now, Nancy Pelosi is asking President Donald Trump to aid those states with their stimulus bill? I will urge all Republican Senators and Congressmen and President Donald Trump to throw that Nancy Pelosi bill in the trash can. It also, disproportionately, benefits illegals too since, each child gets $2,000 each? Illegals have a lot of children. Do the math.
When you have this much financial and political incentive to inflate the numbers you can bet your last buck the numbers will be massaged. Who knows what's the actual truth which is a damn shame. People are sick, people are dying, there is a threat but we have no idea, and I mean no idea at all of the gravity of that threat which means people will suffer, people will die, all more needlessly than is necessary from both the virus and the solutions being put in place. Political activists once again ruining the lives of millions.
I agree numbers are very inaccurate. What do you think of using actual "excess deaths " to measure? It looks at difference between last year total vs this year https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/05/us/coronavirus-death-toll-us.html
This is the only real way to get a good understanding of mortality. When we look at these numbers it is also important to remember those large increases are also during an extended period of lockdown to mitigate the mortality.
Fauci trumps Birx: Fauci dismisses 'conspiracy theory' of overstated US Covid-19 death toll: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...nspiracy-theory-death-overcount-anthony-fauci Top US official says ‘there is absolutely no evidence’ of claims of coronavirus overcount pushed by rightwing media. Anthony Fauci, the top US infectious diseases expert, has warned that baseless “conspiracy theories” are swirling around the coronavirus crisis following claims that America’s official death toll from Covid-19 has been overstated. Fauci, who has been director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, said he had seen unfounded conjecture attach itself to previous crises and dismissed the emerging idea, largely promoted by high-profile figures in rightwing media, that the US’s Covid-19 death toll is being inflated by unrelated medical conditions. “There is absolutely no evidence that that’s the case at all,” Fauci told NBC on Thursday. “I think it falls under the category of something that’s very unfortunate – these conspiracy theories that we hear about. Any time we have a crisis of any sort there is always this popping up of conspiracy theories.” According to the official Centers for Disease Control (CDC) count, by the end of Wednesday there had been 12,754 deaths in the US due to the Covid-19 virus, from a total of 395,011 people who have been confirmed as infected. The number of deaths has more than doubled over the past week, with New York continuing to be at the heart of the crisis after experiencing more infections than the whole of Spain, along with 4,000 deaths. On Tuesday, 779 people died from the coronavirus in New York state, a one-day record. New Jersey also set a one-day record, with 275 deaths, while Louisiana announced 70 further deaths on that day, matching its worst daily toll. Public health experts have criticized a severe lack of planning by the Trump administration for the US becoming the global coronavirus hotspot, with a dearth of testing and equipment leading to hospitals being overwhelmed in places and states desperately scrambling to source ventilators, masks and gowns. But several media figures who are sympathetic to the president have started to question the official death toll, claiming it is being distorted for political purposes, by including in the statistics people dying of other causes. Fox News’s Brit Hume, who has previously tweeted that New York’s “fatality numbers are inflated”, appeared on Tucker Carlson’s late-night show on Tuesday to claim that any person with the virus is being counted as a Covid-19 death “regardless of what else may be wrong”. Carlson responded by saying, “There may be reasons people seek an inaccurate death count,” adding: “When journalists work with numbers, there sometimes is an agenda.” The rightwing radio host Rush Limbaugh, who received the presidential medal of freedom from Trump, previously dismissed Covid-19 as similar to the “common cold” but changed tack recently to claim: “It’s admittedly speculation, but … what if we are recording a bunch of deaths to coronavirus which really should not be chalked up to coronavirus?” Trump regularly echoes theories espoused on Fox News and previously dismissed an official death toll of 3,000 people in Puerto Rico in the wake of 2017’s Hurricane Maria. However, the president has yet to follow suit by questioning the Covid-19 figures, telling reporters that he thinks the states have been “pretty accurate on the death count”. According to Deborah Birx, the response coordinator on the White House’s coronavirus taskforce, a person who goes into hospital to be treated for Covid-19 and has a pre-existing condition that eventually causes them to die, this is counted as a Covid-19 death. This is slightly different from Hume’s claim that someone dying for whatever reason is counted in the toll if they also have the coronavirus. According to the CDC, about 90% of people recently hospitalized with the coronavirus had at least one underlying medical condition. Black people and older people are disproportionately being hospitalized because of the virus, due to their increased rate of other conditions such as diabetes, hypertension or respiratory problems. It is in fact more likely that the coronavirus death toll is much higher than the official figures suggest, rather than it being inflated. The CDC has acknowledged its count is an “underestimation” because it only tallies cases where Covid-19 has been confirmed in a laboratory test. Epidemiologists say a widespread lack of initial testing in the US means many people died without being counted, while even now some people who die at home or in nursing homes are not being tested for the virus. In New York City, more than 200 people are dying at home each day during the pandemic, according to city officials, a very much higher rate than usual. Bill de Blasio, New York City’s mayor, has estimated that about 100 to 200 people a day who die at home in the city are not being included in the official virus death count. But the federal government insists the overall figures are largely accurate. “I think there is more of a chance of missing some that are really coronavirus deaths that are not being counted,” Fauci told NBC. “But I don’t think that number is significant enough to really substantially modify the trends that we are seeing, at all.” ________________ What else you got?
Fight Over Virus’s Death Toll Opens Grim New Front in Election Battle: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/09/us/politics/coronavirus-death-toll-presidential-campaign.html Elements of the right have sought to bolster President Trump’s political standing by turning scientific questions into political issues. The claim was tailor-made for President Trump’s most steadfast backers: Federal guidelines are coaching doctors to mark Covid-19 as the cause of death even when it is not, inflating the pandemic’s death toll. That the claim came from a doctor, Scott Jensen, who also happens to be a Republican state senator in Minnesota, made it all the more alluring to the president’s allies. Never mind the experts who said that, if anything, the death toll was being vastly undercounted. “SHOCKING,” tweeted Chris Berg, a conservative television show host on West Dakota Fox, a Fox affiliate in North Dakota, after interviewing Dr. Jensen last month. Soon after, Laura Ingraham, the Fox News host, invited Dr. Jensen onto her show. His assertions were picked up by Infowars, the conspiracy-oriented website founded by Alex Jones. They were shared by followers of Qanon, who subscribe to a web of vague, baseless theories that a secret cabal in the government is trying to take down the president. Dr. Scott Jensen, a physician and Minnesota state senator, has claimed that doctors may be inflating the coronavirus death toll, despite experts’ insistence that it is undercounted. “What is the primary benefit to keep public in mass-hysteria re: Covid-19? Think voting. Are you awake yet?” a Qanon follower known as John the White wrote on Twitter, saying the pandemic was being used to manipulate the electorate. The likes of John the White may view the world through the most conspiratorial of lenses, but they are hardly the only people weighing the political impact of the virus’s death toll. With implications for how quickly businesses and their employees return to something like normalcy, the fight to shape the official record is adding a grim new front to the presidential campaign. Since the outset of the crisis, elements of the right have sought to bolster the president’s political standing and justify reopening the economy by questioning the death toll. Climate-change skeptics have employed techniques perfected in the fight over global warming to raise doubts about the deadliness of the virus. Others, including Mr. Trump’s media allies as well as some in the anti-vaccine movement, have repurposed fringe theories about “deep state” bureaucrats undermining the president to argue that the official numbers should not be trusted. They have a found a receptive audience, and a booster of their ideas, in Mr. Trump himself. For the president, the death toll has become a pivotal political indicator, as important to his re-election prospects as his approval ratings and his standing against former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in swing-state polls. Late last month, with the number of dead in the United States approaching 75,000, according to figures compiled by The New York Times, projections foresaw another spike in Covid-19 cases and deaths as social-distancing rules relaxed. One draft government report projected as many as 3,000 deaths a day by the end of May. Yet according to administration officials, Mr. Trump has begun privately questioning the models and the official death statistics. His skepticism is shared by others in an administration that has regularly disregarded the advice of scientists. On Tuesday, the White House Council of Economic Advisers released a model that showed deaths dropping to zero by the middle of May. The projection, which the council suggested was to ”inform policymakers,” appeared to ignore the conventions used by epidemiologists and was roundly dismissed by experts. But it did provide a useful counterpoint to those who argue it is too soon to reopen the economy. At the same time, the president has increasingly picked up on talk from the political fringes of inflated death counts and plots to ensure his defeat in November. In late April, as the toll approached 60,000, Mr. Trump retweeted a post by a former New York City police official that claimed the number was being inflated by the same people behind the “failed coup attempts” of the Mueller investigation and Mr. Trump’s impeachment. “Do you really think these lunatics wouldn’t inflate the mortality rates by underreporting the infection rates in an attempt to steal the election?” the post said. A Familiar Playbook At the forefront of the fight are a number of climate skeptics who have long exploited the imperfections of scientific research — statistical margins of error, the subjective elements of projective modeling — to cast doubt on the conclusive finding that humans have contributed to global warming. Steven J. Milloy, a fervent denier of that scientific consensus, was early to play down the coronavirus threat. He compared it to the flu, an argument that public health officials say dangerously underestimates how deadly the virus is. One policy group that has expressed skepticism about climate change, the Heartland Institute, pointed to a widely used projection of 60,000 deaths to attack earlier models predicting up to two million fatalities. The critique, posted on its website on April 17, ignored the fact that the lower estimate took into account social-distancing measures, and that the high estimate and others close to it were presented as worst-case scenarios if no steps were taken to mitigate the virus’s spread. (The 60,000-death projection was rendered null and void 13 days later, when the death toll surpassed that number.) Few of those who tacked from climate skepticism to Covid-19 denialism have any real expertise in tracking pandemics. But several are funded by industries that have long sought to question the work of scientists, such as big oil companies like Exxon Mobil and tobacco companies like Philip Morris. They are also backed by conservative groups like the Mercer Family Foundation that hold immense sway inside the Trump White House, and are deeply invested in the president’s political future. Rebekah Mercer and her father, Robert, at a conference in 2017 questioning the science of climate change. The Mercer Family Foundation has been involved in the conversation around Covid-19.Credit...Oliver Contreras/The Washington Post, via Getty Images “It’s the same individuals. It’s the same modus operandi, the same organizations and the same backers,” said Michael E. Mann, who directs the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University. “Right-wing conservative interests that are benefiting from the Trump presidency obviously want to see a continuation with the Trump presidency.” The lines of attack against the conclusions of health experts are familiar to those who have studied the climate-change denial movement, which has long relied on what Naomi Oreskes, a science historian at Harvard, called “motivated reasoning.” “It’s, ‘I don’t like what this implies; therefore I’m going to deny the evidence, and I’m going to question the models, and I’m going to question the motivations of the people who do it,’” Dr. Oreskes said. For instance, Todd Starnes, a conservative radio host who has likened climate change to “the Tooth Fairy,” fed the virus “truther” movement when he argued that the crisis was overstated because he did not see crowds outside the Brooklyn Hospital Center in New York. It was the pandemic-era equivalent of pointing to a snowstorm as evidence that the planet is not warming. Days later, reporting from inside the hospital found a staff overwhelmed by critical Covid cases. In an interview, James Taylor, who wrote the Heartland critique, drew a direct line between problems he saw in the modeling of Covid-19 deaths and climate science, arguing that in both instances “we don’t have perfect information” with which to make projections. “The coronavirus models’ failure to make accurate predictions to this point should be instructive when we are told to blindly accept certain climate models,” he said. Mr. Trump, for his part, has at times sought to use the uncertainty to his advantage. Last month, after his most ardent supporters had attacked the worst-case death estimates for weeks as evidence of hysteria, Mr. Trump began calling attention to the two million figure — as a benchmark against which to judge his handling of the crisis. Then he went further, pointing to 100,000 deaths as the number against which to judge him. “We will be lower than that number,” Mr. Trump told reporters as the death count kept by Johns Hopkins University approached 38,000. “But I really believe it could have been millions of people had we not done what we did.” Last Sunday, though, Mr. Trump acknowledged that the toll could hit 100,000. Still, he said, it could have been much worse had his administration not acted. “If we didn’t do it, the minimum we would have lost was a million two, a million four, a million five, that’s the minimum. We would have lost probably higher. It’s possible higher than 2.2.” Limited Data Even under the best circumstances, modeling how a pandemic will play out, like modeling the pace and impact of climate change, is an imperfect science. And there is indeed great uncertainty about what the death toll is now — and what it will be — given limited data about the new coronavirus and the different counting methods jurisdictions are using. “There’s a real set of challenges around the statistics — let’s be clear,” said Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel of the University of Pennsylvania, who helped design Obamacare. But in his estimation, conservatives questioning official statistics are mostly seeking evidence that the numbers are exaggerated. “They’re not looking at the full range of data, and if anything, there’s an undercount, not an overcount,” he said. Many of those conservatives have zeroed in on a recommendation by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to add Covid-19 as a “presumed” cause of death even if the diagnosis is not confirmed by a test. The recommendation was partly necessitated by the nationwide lag in testing. Public health officials across the country say that even with the additional “presumed” classifications on death certificates, the actual toll is probably much higher. It was those recommendations that Dr. Jensen, the Minnesota state senator, seized on when he questioned the death toll in a series of social media posts. He also questioned whether hospitals were overreporting cases because Medicare was offering higher payments for treating coronavirus patients. The posts, and subsequent media appearances, prompted the Minnesota health commissioner, Jan Malcolm, to call Dr. Jensen’s claim “misinformation.” Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the federal government’s leading infectious disease specialist, called it a conspiracy theory. Dr. Jensen has continued to question the death toll. In a recent interview, he bristled at being called a conspiracy theorist. “I’m surprised by the vehemence, surprised by the viciousness,” he said. Yet Dr. Jensen chose to air his concerns in partisan venues that are hardly known for measured and thoughtful debate. After his first television appearance, the host, Mr. Berg, pointedly asked on Twitter, “Why is #MN inflating Covid-19 death numbers?” Ms. Ingraham invited Dr. Jensen on Fox News to repeat his claim and address Dr. Fauci’s charge, asking incredulously, “Conspiracy theories, doctor — so you’re engaging in conspiracy theories?” Fox News’s prime-time lineup has often been a clarion for doubt about the pandemic’s severity and the credibility of the nation’s leading health experts. Dr. Birx in March showed the projected number of deaths per day. Beyond her segment with Dr. Jensen, Ms. Ingraham gave a platform to a false and misleading claim by Dr. Phil McGraw, the television therapist, that Covid-19 posed less of a public health threat than swimming pools. While calling for reopening the economy, she has seized on discrepancies in projections to argue that social-distancing measures have gone too far. Others on Fox, like Brit Hume, have pointed to New York as evidence that numbers were being inflated, citing the city’s decision to add presumed cases to its count. While Mr. Trump has proved receptive to such arguments, they appear to be having less of an impact on public opinion. The vast majority of Americans — Republicans and Democrats alike — are following social-distancing guidelines, and recent polls have found broad support for restrictions on businesses imposed by state governments. To Dr. Mann, the seeming inability of Covid skeptics to sow doubts among the public is cause for optimism. “This is sort of a test case for combating denialism and exposing the danger of denialism,” he said. Dr. Jensen, though, has stayed true to his skepticism in his own life. Last week, he plugged into a remote State Senate hearing on easing restrictions on telemedicine for addiction disorders while playing a round of golf, without a mask. Dr. Jensen called in to a hearing last month from a golf course where he was not wearing a face mask. Though he appeared to be trying to hide his location by holding his phone camera close to his face, the background whooshing of a golf club and visible canopy of his cart gave him away. “I just want to ask the senator — how’s he hitting them out there?” a Democratic senator, Jeff Hayden, broke in to ask him.