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It is hard to call it a “success” when most states to “Re-open” are seeing POSITIVE rates of increases, not negative rates, of new COVID cases per 1,000 Tests. As prescribed by Guidelines issued the Trump administration itself, for: “federally recommended decline in cases over a 14-day period.”
Today’s news would indicate the opposite of “success” — whatever that is defined as in Trumpland:
[...]
Texas saw its largest one-day increase in cases on Saturday, with 1,801 new cases. North Carolina also saw its largest single-day jump on Saturday with 853 new cases. And Arizona reported 462 new cases that day, close to a record high.
The seven-day average in new cases in all three states has also been rising, according to data compiled by The New York Times.
[...]
Georgia, one of the earliest states to start reopening, has not seen a spike in cases, and in fact had a slight decrease. Florida, similarly, has been mostly flat.
Yet even this needs to be taken with some caveats.
Because it takes time for someone with the coronavirus to develop symptoms and get tested, it can take two weeks for new cases to show up in the data.
Here’s another “caveat” that national news reporters really should take into account:
“State Medical Examiners reporting the COVID facts accurately, may end up — being censored.”
Florida medical examiners were releasing coronavirus death data. The state made them stop.
State officials have stopped releasing the list of coronavirus deaths being compiled by Florida’s medical examiners, which has at times shown a higher death toll than the state’s published count.
The list had previously been released in real time by the state Medical Examiners Commission. But earlier this month, after the Tampa Bay Times reported that the medical examiners’ death count was 10 percent higher than the figure released by the Florida Department of Health, state officials said the list needed to be reviewed and possibly redacted.
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The agency [Florida Department of Health] has attempted at least once to block information about deaths from COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, from becoming public.
Last month, it tried to persuade the medical examiner’s office in Miami-Dade County to restrict access to its death records, according to the Miami Herald and correspondence between the two agencies obtained by the Times.
Here’s yet another “caveat” that national news reporters really should take into account:
“Those who report the COVID facts accurately, may end up — losing their jobs.”
Update: Florida Health Department manager told to delete coronavirus data forced to resign, she says
One day before a top Florida Department of Health data manager lost her role maintaining the state’s COVID-19 data, she objected to the removal of records showing people had symptoms or positive tests before the cases were announced, according to internal emails obtained by the Tampa Bay Times.
[...]
The dashboard that Jones managed is the best official source for in-depth data on how the deadly pandemic is moving through the state. Studying it is the surest way to know where outbreaks are growing and where testing is being done. Without access to the data, Floridians would have to rely on the word of officials and politicians without being able to verify for themselves.
[...]
In her Friday email to subscribers of a COVID data listserv, [Rebekah] Jones said she was reassigned on May 5 “[f]or reasons beyond my division’s control” and warned that whoever took over may be less straightforward.
“As a word of caution, I would not expect the new team to continue the same level of accessibility and transparency that I made central to the process during the first two months. After all, my commitment to both is largely (arguably entirely) the reason I am no longer managing it,” she wrote.
[...]
Any first year student of statistics can tell you, it’s pretty easy to get the “numbers you want” (rates “mostly flat”) — if you only selectively or biasedly decide which data to use.
And which data to discard … (Discard, along with those reporting those data accurately.)
Something tells me, that those states with miraculously “declining rates” of new COVID cases per 1,000 Tests — may be applying some of the “magical thinking” tricks, that Donald Trump has been imploring them to use …
“When you test, you have a case. When you test, you find something is wrong with people. If we didn’t do any testing, we would have very few cases.”
— Donald Trump, touring the medical supply distributor Owens and Minor in Allentown, PA — May 14, 2020