At a time when Americans are clamoring for accurate information about the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, some officials in certain states are doing their best to make the task more difficult.
Like Virginia.
Last week, Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam’s ‘coronavirus response team’ essentially admitted to padding the state’s testing numbers after announcing a sudden 15 percent spike.
“You need to know the exact number of tests not the number of people who had tests,” Dr. Daniel Carey, Virginia Secretary of Health and Human Resources, told reporters.
As such, the Virginia Department of Health announced that it will begin counting the number of positive tests, not the number of people who test positive. So, if the same person is tested more than once and all of those tests come back positive, they will be added to the overall ‘positive’ test count, which makes for a major inaccuracy.
“We realized for Virginia that that change in methodology made a clear sense because we want to make sure that other number that we’re reporting since so many folks are focusing on that as we move into the phases so as one of the important indicators,” Carey said, in what seems like babble.
This system of counting multiple positive tests on the same person is something only a bureaucrat or a functionary would love.
Most Americans don’t care how many tests are being done, they want to know how many people have been tested, and more importantly how many are positive, so they can feel more comfortable knowing how the disease is either progressing or receding before venturing out in public again or going back to work.
The number of positive tests, however, will artificially boost the ‘positives’ and that will be all most people will hear; they will see that ‘X number of positive tests’ and believe that it represents an equivalent number of people, which, of course, won’t be true.
Worse, Virginia isn’t the only state engaged in this chicanery. WWBT reports that “other states” including North Carolina is also counting the number of positive tests, not the number of people testing positive.
What’s more, this development comes as Democrats, especially, have been calling for ‘more testing’ in order to argue against states that are opening their economies, albeit more slowly than many Americans would like.
Without ‘more testing,’ they say, it’s ‘too dangerous’ to reopen. Well, padding testing numbers would seem to add to the justification of reopening economies.
But isn’t Virginia a bluish-purple state? Yes, it is. So why would the state’s Democrat governor be in favor of padding testing numbers? Perhaps because he is beginning to understand how economically devastating it has been to keep his state on coronavirus lockdown.
Whatever the reason, counting tests instead of counting infected people is dishonest at best and purposely misleading at worst.
As Nate Silver writes at FiveThirtyEight, misleading test results can lead to misguided assistance policies:
In many parts of the world today, health authorities are still trying to triage the situation with a limited number of tests available. Their goal in testing is often to allocate scarce medical care to the patients who most need it — rather than to create a comprehensive dataset for epidemiologists and statisticians to study.
But if you’re not accounting for testing patterns, it can throw your conclusions entirely out of whack. You don’t just run the risk of being a little bit wrong: Your analysis could be off by an order of magnitude. Or even worse, you might be led in the opposite direction of what is actually happening.
The fact is, inaccurate testing or testing that provides for inaccurate caseloads will lead to inaccurate conclusions about the pandemic, and we don’t need any more of those.
We’ve had plenty of inaccuracies already, which have led to disastrous policy decisions — like killing our economy.
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Just because they're only now admitting this, doesn't mean the public hadn't already figured out what they were up to. These guys seems to forget this is the age of the internet, and that rarely do things like this go unmentioned. They've got their backs to us while they do horrible things, forgetting their butts are showing.
It's not about us. Both the Democrats and the media know we are on to them. It's about their half of the country that still believes them.
Butts, pointed hoods and black faces are showing. But then what could be expect from a state that was stupid enough to reelect a governor and lieutenant governor that condone infanticide and an attorney general that abuses women? Why would we think that these "public servants" wouldn't game the numbers to reap a bigger chunk of change from the feds? Wake up Virginia! You EFF'd up AGAIN! There needs to be an investigation into this latest travesty and if any laws were broken the perpetrators and those directing them need to be prosecuted.
This one big unfunny joke! Political snafu! Try to terrify the public into seeing it their way... Good thing is that most aren’t sheeple and see though the bull....
The sadder thing for me has been Not that our politicians appear to forget that they are our servants and we the people are boss. The sadder thing for me is that so many of us, the people, appear to have forgotten this too.
I see signs of more Americans remembering they are Americans – different than all other people on the planet – We are Boss. If enough of us people remember we are their boss, we can make our politicians remember that they are our servants – and that is All their job is about.
And if we want our servants to do something other than what they are now doing, our servants should have no say. They can say but, but, but – and we can listen to their buts – but ultimately they have no say. We’re boss.
None of these “COVID Victims” had any prior symptoms… however…
“His third massive heart attack did not kill him, COVID-19 did!"
"That safe dropped on his head, from a ten-story window did not kill him, COVID-19 did!"
"That house-fire that he was trapped in, did not kill him, COVID-19 did!"
"Forgetting to don his parachute and jumping at 10,000 feet, did not kill him, COVID-19 did!"
The CDC has its reduced its numbers by 30,000! Too many States are padding their numbers and skewing the results. There is a 98% chance of surviving this apart from anything else.
They're padding their numbers because there is a ton of money to be made from covid. Not everyone that's sick has covid. Some may have the seasonal flu by the way has not been mentioned at all. Covid did not cancel out the flu.
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