china's fudging the numbers they said... shithole countries they said.... https://www.thedailybeast.com/team-trump-pushes-cdc-to-dial-down-covid-death-counts Team Trump Pushes CDC to Revise Down Its COVID Death Counts The president and members of his task force are skeptical of the numbers and want the methodology changed. President Donald Trump and members of his coronavirus task force are pushing officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to change how the agency works with states to count coronavirus-related deaths. And they’re pushing for revisions that could lead to far fewer deaths being counted than originally reported, according to five administration officials working on the government’s response to the pandemic. Though he has previously publicly attested to the accuracy of the COVID-19 death count, the president in recent weeks has privately raised suspicion about the number of fatalities in the United States, which recently eclipsed 80,000 recorded deaths. In talks with top officials, Trump has suggested that those numbers could have been incorrectly tallied or even inflated by current methodology, two individuals with knowledge of those private comments said. The White House has pressed the CDC, in particular, to work with states to change how they count coronavirus deaths and report them back to the federal government, according to two officials with knowledge of those conversations. And Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the administration’s coronavirus task force, has urged CDC officials to exclude from coronavirus death-count reporting some of those individuals who either do not have confirmed lab results and are presumed positive or who have the virus and may not have died as a direct result of it, according to three senior administration officials. Officials inside the CDC, five of whom spoke to The Daily Beast, said they are pushing back against that request, claiming it could falsely skew the mortality rate at a time when state and local governments are already struggling to ensure that every person who dies as a result of the coronavirus is counted. Scientists and doctors working with the task force, including Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, have said the U.S. death-toll count is likely higher than is being reflected in government data sets. And several local officials in hot spot areas said they’ve seen hundreds if not thousands more deaths over the last two months than in the same time period over the last several years. They presume many of those individuals contracted the coronavirus. “I don’t worry about this overreporting issue,” Bob Anderson, the chief of the Mortality Statistics Branch in CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, told The Daily Beast. Anderson’s team is in charge of aggregating, calculating, and reporting coronavirus deaths for the agency. “We’re almost certainly underestimating the number of deaths [in the country].” The pressure being placed on the CDC is yet another tension point between the agency and the White House that has erupted over its handling of the coronavirus. Those tensions have reached a boiling point over the last several weeks as the CDC has worked to publish its guidelines for states working to reopen their local economies. The guidelines, which provide detailed information about how local officials can begin to allow some residents to attend religious gatherings and summer camps, were contested by White House officials who sought to shelve many of the agency’s recommendations. The emerging fight over death counts represents a new front line in these battles—one that’s attracted the direct interest of the president himself. Though Trump has quietly suggested that the U.S. is inflating the COVID-19 death tolls, one task-force official told The Daily Beast that any discussion about mortality rate is merely a small part of a broader dialogue about how to improve the quality of data at the local, state, and federal level. That official called the mortality rate a “far-lagging indicator” of the spread of the virus and argued that it was “not a real-time indicator of how the virus is affecting the population.” The official said it was the task force’s view that the mortality rate doesn’t “inform the response efforts as other data could, like hospitalizations” and that the virus moves through populations “like nursing homes and prisons,” as well as populations with comorbidities. But according to other knowledgeable sources, there is broader skepticism within the White House over how the CDC is compiling its data. In a task-force meeting last week, officials relayed that Birx said she couldn’t trust the CDC’s numbers—on both case and death counts—because the reporting system it relied upon was flawed. She argued that the agency was likely overcounting. The Washington Post was the first to report on the meeting. Officials in the CDC said they were confused by the argument. “The system can always get better. But if we’ve learned anything it’s that we’re seeing some of these individuals who have died of the virus slip through the cracks,” one official told The Daily Beast. “It’s not that we’re overcounting.” But according to one of the sources with knowledge of Trump’s private remarks, the president recently said that he’d like a “review” of how the coronavirus deaths are counted and studied by the government, citing hypothetical cases in which a person has the virus but is killed by other unnatural means, such as falling down a flight of stairs. The other source said that Trump pointed out that death estimates for other incidents—such as natural disasters and wars—are revised down or up “all the time,” and that the coronavirus pandemic could have similar fluctuations in the numbers published by public and private entities. (This month, Axios was first to report on Trump voicing doubts behind closed doors about current body counts.) It’s an argument that has gained traction in various pro-Trump circles, as well, and is mirrored by the complaints of some of the president’s closest advisers. “My view is the president is totally correct that we need to have medical transparency,” said Art Laffer, a longtime conservative economist who has counseled Trump and other key administration officials on coronavirus response and how to “open” the economy amid the pandemic. “When you attribute a death to the coronavirus today, what that means is that the guy had the coronavirus and died. It doesn’t matter if he got hit by a car and died, and he would still be categorized as a coronavirus death... You need the whole transcribed medical records on a disk so people can sit there, maybe without names, and look for causes and correlations.” Anderson said Laffer’s assessment was incorrect and that the form used by physicians to report coronavirus deaths specifically asks them to answer: “Did the patient die as a result of this illness?” “It doesn’t say ‘Did this patient die?’” Anderson said. Anderson’s division at the CDC keeps tabs on novel coronavirus deaths through two parallel tracking systems. It relies on the data it receives from local departments of health and through information it gathers from states through a death-certificate digital coding system. Anderson said the death count is normally higher from states’ health systems than the death certificate system data. “But those numbers aren’t necessarily inconsistent,” he said, adding that the death-certificate death count usually lags anywhere from two to eight weeks. Meanwhile, local officials and doctors say any disruption in the way they count coronavirus deaths could lead to a significant undercounting. One study by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene published Monday said that there were thousands of “excess deaths” in the city from March 11 to May 2. About 18,879 of those deaths were explicitly tied to the coronavirus. But the study said there were also an additional 5,200 that were not identified as either laboratory-confirmed or probable COVID-19-associated deaths, but could have been tied to the virus in some other way. Gretchen Van Wye, the assistant commissioner of the Bureau of Vital Statistics at New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, said her team matches individuals coded as having died from the coronavirus with the lab results to get a “confirmed” category of people daily. Then, with individuals that aren’t coded, the team uses an algorithm to search for words such as “Covid” or “Covid-19” on their death certificate to create a “probable” category. Unlike other cities across the country, New York City includes this probable count in its reporting. The rest of the results are considered as “other” deaths. In New Jersey, officials told The Daily Beast that they have seen an uptick in the number of patients arriving at the hospital already deceased who were never tested for the virus. Two doctors—one in New York City and one in Jersey City—said that they have not tagged certain individuals as having died as a result of the coronavirus because families requested it be kept off the death certificate so they could more easily collect the remains. Even with the death-certificate coding system, doctors and local officials say they are running into problems where some of their patients are not being counted in the total coronavirus death tally. State officials are required to enter a specific code—a seven-digit number—on a death certificate to identify whether an individual has died as a result of COVID-19, Anderson said. The CDC requires doctors to input “COVID-19” in order for an individual to be counted in the national system as having died as a result of the coronavirus. Several doctors in New York City who spoke with The Daily Beast said in high intensity situations human error could result in a physician not coding a patient correctly. Doctors were coding patients as simply “coronavirus” or some variation of that without indicating that the virus was specific to the 2020 pandemic. In some instances they were forgetting to input “-19” after “COVID”. “Now we’re having to go back and recode those deaths,” Anderson said, adding that there were more than 1,500 individuals who were mistakenly overlooked in the first few weeks the CDC was calculating the coronavirus death count.
CDC fudging the numbers Who could've seen this coming? https://www.theatlantic.com/health/...-test-data-pennsylvania-georgia-texas/611935/ ‘How Could the CDC Make That Mistake?’ The government’s disease-fighting agency is conflating viral and antibody tests, compromising a few crucial metrics that governors depend on to reopen their economies. Pennsylvania, Georgia, Texas, and other states are doing the same. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is conflating the results of two different types of coronavirus tests, distorting several important metrics and providing the country with an inaccurate picture of the state of the pandemic. We’ve learned that the CDC is making, at best, a debilitating mistake: combining test results that diagnose current coronavirus infections with test results that measure whether someone has ever had the virus. The upshot is that the government’s disease-fighting agency is overstating the country’s ability to test people who are sick with COVID-19. The agency confirmed to The Atlantic on Wednesday that it is mixing the results of viral and antibody tests, even though the two tests reveal different information and are used for different reasons. This is not merely a technical error. States have set quantitative guidelines for reopening their economies based on these flawed data points. Several states—including Pennsylvania, the site of one of the country’s largest outbreaks, as well as Texas, Georgia, and Vermont—are blending the data in the same way. Virginia likewise mixed viral and antibody test results until last week, but it reversed course and the governor apologized for the practice after it was covered by the Richmond Times-Dispatch and The Atlantic. Maine similarly separated its data on Wednesday; Vermont authorities claimed they didn’t even know they were doing this. The widespread use of the practice means that it remains difficult to know exactly how much the country’s ability to test people who are actively sick with COVID-19 has improved. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Ashish Jha, the K. T. Li Professor of Global Health at Harvard and the director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, told us when we described what the CDC was doing. “How could the CDC make that mistake? This is a mess.” Viral tests, taken by nose swab or saliva sample, look for direct evidence of a coronavirus infection. They are considered the gold standard for diagnosing someone with COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus: State governments consider a positive viral test to be the only way to confirm a case of COVID-19. Antibody tests, by contrast, use blood samples to look for biological signals that a person has been exposed to the virus in the past. A negative test result means something different for each test. If somebody tests negative on a viral test, a doctor can be relatively confident that they are not sick right now; if somebody tests negative on an antibody test, they have probably never been infected with or exposed to the coronavirus. (Or they may have been given a false result—antibody tests are notoriously less accurate on an individual level than viral tests.) The problem is that the CDC is clumping negative results from both tests together in its public reporting. Read: Pools will test the limits of social distancing Mixing the two tests makes it much harder to understand the meaning of positive tests, and it clouds important information about the U.S. response to the pandemic, Jha said. “The viral testing is to understand how many people are getting infected, while antibody testing is like looking in the rearview mirror. The two tests are totally different signals,” he told us. By combining the two types of results, the CDC has made them both “uninterpretable,” he said. The public-radio station WLRN, in Miami, first reported that the CDC was mixing viral and antibody test results. Pennsylvania’s and Maine’s decisions to mix the two tests have not been previously reported. Kristen Nordlund, a spokesperson for the CDC, told us that the inclusion of antibody data in Florida is one reason the CDC has reported hundreds of thousands more tests in Florida than the state government has. The agency hopes to separate the viral and antibody test results in the next few weeks, she said in an email. But until the agency does so, its results will be suspect and difficult to interpret, says William Hanage, an epidemiology professor at Harvard. In addition to misleading the public about the state of affairs, the intermingling “makes the lives of actual epidemiologists tremendously more difficult.” “Combining a test that is designed to detect current infection with a test that detects infection at some point in the past is just really confusing and muddies the water,” Hanage told us. The CDC stopped publishing anything resembling a complete database of daily test results on February 29. When it resumed publishing test data last week, a page of its website explaining its new COVID Data Tracker said that only viral tests were included in its figures. “These data represent only viral tests. Antibody tests are not currently captured in these data,” the page said as recently as May 18. Yesterday, that language was changed. All reference to disaggregating the two different types of tests disappeared. “These data are compiled from a number of sources,” the new version read. The text strongly implied that both types of tests were included in the count, but did not explicitly say so. The CDC’s data have also become more favorable over the past several days. On Monday, a page on the agency’s website reported that 10.2 million viral tests had been conducted nationwide since the pandemic began, with 15 percent of them—or about 1.5 million—coming back positive. But yesterday, after the CDC changed its terms, it said on the same page that 10.8 million tests of any type had been conducted nationwide. Yet its positive rate had dropped by a percent. On the same day it expanded its terms, the CDC added 630,205 new tests, but it added only 52,429 positive results. This is what concerns Jha. Because antibody tests are meant to be used on the general population, not just symptomatic people, they will, in most cases, have a lower percent-positive rate than viral tests. So blending viral and antibody tests “will drive down your positive rate in a very dramatic way,” he said. The absence of clear national guidelines has led to widespread confusion about how testing data should be reported. Pennsylvania reports negative viral and antibody tests in the same metric, a state spokesperson confirmed to us on Wednesday. The state has one of the country’s worst outbreaks, with more than 67,000 positive cases. But it has also slowly improved its testing performance, testing about 8,000 people in a day. Yet right now it is impossible to know how to interpret any of its accumulated results. Texas, where the rate of new COVID-19 infections has stubbornly refused to fall, is one of the most worrying states (along with Georgia). The Texas Observer first reported last week that the state was lumping its viral and antibody results together. On Tuesday, Governor Greg Abbott denied that the state was blending the results, but the Dallas Observer reports that it is still doing so. While the number of tests per day has increased in Texas, climbing to more than 20,000, the combined results mean that the testing data are essentially uninterpretable. It is impossible to know the true percentage of positive viral tests in Texas. It is impossible to know how many of the 718,000 negative results were not meant to diagnose a sick person. The state did not return a request for comment, nor has it produced data describing its antibody or viral results separately. (Some states, following guidelines from the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists, report antibody-test positives as “probable” COVID-19 cases without including them in their confirmed totals.) Georgia is in a similar situation. It has also seen its COVID-19 infections plateau amid a surge in testing. Like Texas, it reported more than 20,000 new results on Wednesday, the majority of them negative. But because, according to The Macon Telegraph, it is also blending its viral and antibody results together, its true percent-positive rate is impossible to know. (The governor’s office did not return a request for comment.) These results damage the public’s ability to understand what is happening in any one state. On a national scale, they call the strength of America’s response to the coronavirus into question. The number of tests conducted nationwide each day has more than doubled in the past month, rising from about 147,000 a month ago to more than 413,000 on Wednesday, according to the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic, which compiles data reported by state and territorial governments. In the past week, the daily number of tests has grown by about 90,000. At the same time, the portion of tests coming back positive has plummeted, from a seven-day average of 10 percent at the month’s start to 6 percent on Wednesday. “The numbers have outstripped what I was expecting,” Jha said. “My sense is people are really surprised that we’ve moved as much as we have in such a short time period. I think we all expected a move and we all expected improvement, but the pace and size of that improvement has been a big surprise.” The intermingling of viral and antibody tests suggests that some of those gains might be illusory. If even a third of the country’s gain in testing has come by expanding antibody tests, not viral tests, then its ability to detect an outbreak is much smaller than it seems. There is no way to ascertain how much of the recent increase in testing is from antibody tests until the most populous states in the country—among them Texas, Georgia, and Pennsylvania—show their residents everything in the data.
So blending viral and antibody tests “will drive down your positive rate in a very dramatic way,” he said. And I say so what... who is reporting the test positive rate to us? What this mistake at the CDC is doing is inflating the amount of new cases... Its not helping us as a country its hurting us. Its keeping us shut. On the other hand, if you artificially inflate new cases eventually you will also get a lower Case and Infection fatality rate (probably after some lag) but I will bet the CDC corrects for that error very quickly.
One of the primary guidelines for reopening the economy was ramping up testing. The viral tests are typically only given to people that are symptomatic. Antibody tests are given to everyone. There's no doubt that positive test rates will be driven down by testing the asymptomatic, but I don't see why that is a bad thing. That just means that we're casting a wider net to gather data. States are still recording new daily cases, so it's not like we won't be able to spot a big spike if it were to occur. I don't understand why anyone would be upset by the combination of viral & antibody testing data.
Of course he is, its what he does. This deserves its own thread really but it is worth considering how the covid-19 lockdowns have stopped things like influenza in its tracks and will make many strains of rhinovirus (cold) extinct a friend who runs a lot of medical trials commented. Of course considered but masks and distancing will completely bugger the next flu season and it will be very interesting to see what happens in Argentina etc in tbe next months. Basically the all cause death reasons will be affected dramatically. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01538-8
More testing isn't the issue here, confounding both tests is. You can't gauge additional new cases and track infection effectively if you're lumping both together as merely "positive"
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/po...-states-face-criticism-covid-19-data-n1202086 'I'm looking for the truth': States face criticism for COVID-19 data cover-ups The public must be given complete and accurate information about the coronavirus pandemic, experts said. As states ramp up their reopenings, some are coming under criticism for making public misleading statistics or concealing information related to the coronavirus outbreak. While the U.S. has reported more cases and deaths than any other country, the method for counting COVID-19 deaths varies by state. In testimony before the Senate earlier this month, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert, said the actual number of people who've died as a result of the pandemic is "almost certainly" higher than what's been counted. Such data has been the basis for how quickly states are beginning to open up and return to a sense of normalcy. But government officials in a number of states are facing questions about how open and honest they're being about how the virus is impacting their state. "Accurate, complete and timely information is the best way to understand, respond to and limit the impact of the virus on both health and the economy," Dr. Tom Frieden, who ran the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under former President Barack Obama, told NBC News. "This helps to set realistic expectations on how the pandemic will affect people's lives and to inform required changes in behavior to prevent the spread of the virus," he added. Georgia officials have apologized and corrected what was described as a "processing error" that wrongly showed a downward trend in the number of new daily infections in the state, making it appear as if new infections had dropped every day for two weeks. The error was at least the third in three weeks, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. Georgia was among the first states to launch its reopening. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, said the state on Tuesday recorded its lowest number of hospitalized patients since it began tracking such data in early April. In the neighboring state of Florida, which has also moved expeditiously in reopening swathes of its economy, several data-related controversies also have brewed. According to internal emails obtained by the Tampa Bay Times, state officials directed a top Florida Department of Health data manager earlier this month to remove data from public view that showed Florida residents had reported coronavirus-associated symptoms before cases were officially announced. The emails showed that the data manager, Rebekah Jones, had complied with the order but said it was the "wrong call." Jones was taken off her role maintaining the state's coronavirus dashboard one day after that directive. She told a local CBS affiliate that she refused to "manually change data to drum up support for the plan to reopen" Florida. Last week, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, said Jones was under "active criminal charges" for cyber stalking and cyber sexual harassment. https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/22/health/cdc-mixing-coronavirus-tests/index.html CDC and 11 states acknowledge mixing results of viral and antibody tests How do you decide who gets a coronavirus vaccine if there is a shortage? 02:26 (CNN)The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention acknowledged on Friday it had mixed together results from viral and antibody coronavirus tests on its website. Eleven states also confirmed mixing viral and antibody test results. The CDC says it's planning to separate those numbers in the coming weeks, but experts say the current method is unhelpful and potentially misleading. That's because antibody tests aren't used to diagnose current infections or determine whether someone is potentially contagious. Instead, they indicate whether someone has been exposed to the virus in the past. Combining numbers from antibody and viral tests pushes up the total number of tests conducted in the US. But antibody tests are often intended for the general public -- not just people with suspected infections -- so they can skew a key indicator of how the pandemic is progressing: the percentage of tests that come back positive. The CDC's method makes it appear that the US has greater capacity to test than it really does, at least when it comes to identifying current infections.
Fudging confirmed at the highest levels: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/23/trump-joking-slowing-coronavirus-testing-335459 ‘I don’t kid’: Trump says he wasn’t joking about slowing coronavirus testing Administration officials have scrambled in recent days to clean up Trump’s statements last Saturday in Tulsa, Okla.