
Virginia Juked Its Covid-19 Data - danso
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/05/covid-19-tests-combine-virginia/611620/
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SpicyLemonZest
I dunno, I'm kinda on Virginia's side here. If "pandemic response efforts
assumed clean, standard, accessible data would exist", that seems like a fault
of the pandemic response efforts, not the people who produce messy and non-
standard data.

(Important context: Virginia stopped aggregating antibody tests as soon as
they learned it was misleading people.
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-antibody-
covid...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-antibody-
covid-19-tests-northam-
reopening/2020/05/14/fa9f62b0-95e4-11ea-82b4-c8db161ff6e5_story.html))

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NathanKP
On the one hand I want to apply Hanlon's Razor ("Never attribute to malice
that which is adequately explained by stupidity").

But on the other hand there have been a lot of very dubious choices made
through out this entire pandemic, choices where surely there must have been at
least one person who objected but was overruled for some reason.

Even NYC fudged its numbers early on by choosing to initially only report
deaths where the infected person died in a hospital, after getting a positive
test result. They were not initially counting people who chose to die at home,
died in nursing homes, or died in hospitals before they were able to get one
of the limited tests that were available.

At some point when you look at the how the numbers are calculated and it is
painfully obvious that the numbers are being calculated wrong you have to ask
"how did this happen?" Surely there was at least one intelligent person along
the way in Virginia who must have suggested "hey let's not mix these test
numbers together" or in NYC at least one intelligent person who said "hey
let's also count nursing home deaths".

When it takes a public expose pointing out how wrong the numbers are in order
to get the numbers corrected, that is a problem. It might be just a major case
of brain drain in these public service roles, or it might be something more
sinister.

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SpicyLemonZest
But I don't think it's right to call these "fudged". It strikes me as the
appropriate division of labor. Government administrators are responsible for
reporting the data they've collected; it's pandemic modelers, not
administrators, who are best equipped to determine which data is useful and
what the data implies. Pandemic modelers realized they needed data on PCR
tests only, so they told Virginia that and now they're getting it - the system
worked!

It'd be a different story if Virginia said "this is the number of test
suitable for contact tracing we're doing", or NYC said "this is an unbiased
estimate of the total mortality burden of covid-19 in our city". But I don't
think they did.

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m0llusk
This seems like alarmism. All of these tests are useful, and the antibody
tests scale better as they are quicker and cheaper which makes them useful for
contact tracing containment. Because most COVID-19 infections that have
negative outcomes, that is hospitalization or death, are in people with one or
more other major chronic health problems the numbers are complex and
identifying a single cause of death is not necessarily correct.

In any case most analysts agree that if you want really good numbers for
comparison between countries and over time then the only way to go is with all
cause mortality. That number captures all of the most serious impacts and has
a strongly identifiable spike.

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kgin
Did anyone else not have any idea what juked means?

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LandR
I've only ever heard it used in a fighting sense, like dodging or feinting a
blow.

Apparently it also means fake, so they faked their data. But this doesn't seem
right either reading the actual article.

IT wasn't faked so much as it was aggregated poorly to mislead. Or weren't
clear what the data actually showed (antibodies v active infections).

Seems a strange choice of word.

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najarvg
Does an institution like CDC have the mandate to ask for the antibody and
viral tests to be reported separately by all states? I would seem to me that
we would all benefit as a country if this were done and the data were made
available freely (raw and reports data)

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angry_octet
This has the same feeling as officials in the Soviet Union faking production
numbers. What a tragedy of greedy ineptitude.

