Erick Erickson keeps promising to stop sending mail to people who don’t send him money, and then he sends mail anyways. This one is useful and informative, especially if you’ve been bewildered by the report that New York is suddenly upping its Covid-19 death count by 3000+:
The CDC changed the guidelines for a number of reasons. First, “there are too many cases of flu to test and confirm so laboratory-confirmed data is a vast underestimate of the true number of cases.” Second, “influenza and pneumonia syndrome are diagnostic codes used by all hospitals. Capturing this number will reflect a fuller picture of influenza and influenza-related serious illness and deaths in the United States during the pandemic.”
Currently, with COVID-19, to get a very accurate picture, the CDC has used only confirmed testing in its nationwide reporting. But we know testing is insufficient. As a result, just like with the flu, the CDC is asking states to keep a record of presumed cases for later analysis and to accurately document on death certificates if COVID-19 is suspected.
How do they know COVID-19 is suspected? Well, if someone has all the symptoms and we know they either were around an infected person before the symptoms or others got it after coming into contact with them, we can be sure they had COVID-19 even if they did not get tested. Likewise, if they have air sac damage and symptoms consistent with COVID-19, we can know they had it, even if they did not get a test.
The New York Times may not have explained this well, but it is not difficult to understand.
Put more broadly, we have been comparing COVID-19 confirmed deaths to flu deaths, which have included both confirmed and presumed deaths. What New York City is now doing is providing a better apples to apples comparison. Now, in their public release of data, New York City will have confirmed and presumed COVID-19 deaths just as all previous reports of flu deaths in New York had both confirmed and presumed deaths in that total.
This gives us a fuller picture of what is happening. There’s no conspiracy and no effort to make it seem worse than it is. The situation is bad. Getting an accurate picture of just how bad it is makes sense.
Or, as is often said in science, you can be precisely wrong, or you can be imprecisely right. At the numbers we’re now talking, we can be off by a few and still be making proper decisions.
And thanks to Erickson for stating this precisely. I don’t subscribe to The New York Times, as I already have a sub to The Washington Post and that takes up more than enough of my time, so I have no idea if they performed as poorly as Erickson would have his readers believe – I suspect Erickson sometimes misinterprets the mainstream media in order to condemn them. But this was a nice clarification, and I certainly don’t have time to call up the CDC for clarification, as he did.
