look, first you don’t test. that helps the numbers a lot.
then, you make sure sick people can’t get help. that helps the numbers even more.
if you can’t see the problem, then there is problem. no problem, no tree in the forest that falls to make a noise. no trees, no global warming. ipso facto, we can burn all the oil we need, and the economy is fine. if the economy is fine, then people can buy health insurance. if they can buy health insurance, then there’s no problem getting a respirator. so there’s no covid. and everything’s fine.
Yeah, look at the numbers of COVID-19 deaths in New York from April 16, 17, and 23 - those spikes stand out like anything over the rest of the curve.They predictably came in right after what would otherwise have been the inflection point.
Hmm. I thought NYC was still in the thick of it in late April. In Italy and China, the catch-up spike happened a solid month after the hospitalization rates settled down.
I say this because I can remember the comments along the lines of “See, China never had it under control!” or “See, China was hiding their death numbers!” when it was just the reporting catching up with reality. Enough time had passed from the peak of the infection there that the spike looked anomalous.
One thing that suggests that NY has been keeping up with the reporting since then is that there’s a new spike every Monday, like clockwork, as the weekend’s stats come in. Also, in per capita caseload, NY is now near the back of the pack of US states. Eventually someone will retabulate by date of death, rather than date of report, and then consider the excess death rate over a seasonally adjusted normal from previous years.
That will deal with the phenomenon that (in NY at least) most natural deaths outside a hospital are recorded as ‘cardiopulmonary arrest.’ As my stepfather, a retired undertaker, puts it: “No doctor has a problem with certifying that the departed patient’s heart stopped beating.” I have seen this phenomenon personally. My mother passed at home, from liver failure secondary to metastatic cancer, and her passing was not unexpected. Still, the death certificate listed ‘cardiopulmonary arrest’ with a contributing cause of ‘previously undiagnosed atherosclerotic disease,’ and ‘metastatic cancer’ only as an ‘other factor.’ The way the system confuses the medico-legal cause with the actual probable cause makes death statistics damned hard to deal with.
The Monday mini-spike is true of all reporting I’ve seen across the country, not just NY. You make a good point about the “excess deaths” reporting, and that’s kinda what I’m getting at. From the fatality numbers we’ve seen from NY, there should be an excess death number attributable to COVID-19 of 5-10k that hasn’t been reported yet. That’s not new deaths, that’s just catching up with testing and calculating those numbers from April-May.
That one day towered over the rest of the curve until they decided how to distribute the events over time
New York City today has reported 3,778 additional deaths that have occurred since March 11 and have been classified as “probable,” defined as follows: “decedent […] had no known positive laboratory test for SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) but the death certificate lists as a cause of death “COVID-19” or an equivalent" [source]. We will add these to the New York State total as soon as it is determined whether the historical distribution can be obtained
Watching today’s coronavirus press briefing. A reporter asked Pence how is it that the campaign isn’t contributing to the problem when they are ignoring regulations and guidance by holding rallies. Pence basically said (without explicitly saying it), “because we can”.
