Fred Lybrand

Massachusetts circulates a great daily report on C19 every day at 4 PM – the “COVID-19 Dashboard” is posted every day and contains a very detailed, 30+ page summary of the State’s Covid response reporting.

It must be very difficult to pull together these reports, and they are very thorough compared to other states. Why are they so hard to compare to Massachusett’s own annual death reports?

The ideal mortality report shouldn’t be so singularly focused on deaths from SARS-COV-19 and the Corona virus.

• Show the daily death totals.
• Assign every death to a category.
• The report should be an ‘accelerated’ reporting of the annual death data, just done on a daily basis.
• The current reporting as done is very difficult to compare to any other death reporting. Why?

Why does the Massachusetts Data look so different than other sources of mortality data?

• The age groups are different than the State’s own 2017 mortality report.
• The State of Massachusetts’s 2017 mortality report tracks different age brackets than the CDC shows.
• This data can’t be fixed by downloading the raw data / information – it still doesn’t line up.

The following are all constraints in how data is reported:

1. Lag in Data Reporting
2. Ability to Access Data Directly
3. Use of ‘Estimates’ and algorithms in base data
4. Inconsistent methods and terms with current data
5. Use of different age brackets
6. Region-to-region variability
7. Death definitions (included vs “due to”)

There is an enormous amount of confusion around Covid-19. The data is confusing. Media and personal interpretation make it more confusing. It is hard to understand what is really happening, and without knowing reality, it is hard to know how to react.

“Don’t force certainty on uncertain situations.”

Eli Goldratt – The Goal

What is the Base Rate?

Because of the rate of spread of the virus and the potential to overload hospital systems, most of the world is in quarantine. Because of all the safety precautions, fewer people overall are dying. The confusion about diagnosing the disease, detecting the disease in those who have passed away, and inconsistency in how mortalities are labeled still makes it hard to understand what is happening.

All cause mortality tracks how many people have died due to any cause – and that shows that something is happening in the population. The spike in New York City deaths has surpassed 9/11. As the charts below from the Financial Times and other sources show, several regions show a surge in all-cause mortality.

650,000 Italians died in 2019. 2,839,205 Americans died in the same year. If the citizens of both countries are sheltering-in-place, avoiding risks and less likely to die from other cuases – then any rise in ‘all-cause’ fatalities should be due to Covid-19.

Thanks to the Chartstravaganza by @PlanMaestro and Germany’s Christian Drosten who directs the Institute of Virology at the Charité Hospital in Berlin for providing this background information.

Infectious disease is confusing. When Goldratt wrote The Goal, the hero Alex Rogo never wanted for good data. C19 has presented confusing, conflicting data around the goal. This calls into question measurement and observation methods. It makes decisions harder to make.

For all of the confusion that comes from the original data, we see an added layer of confusion in how this data is reported and interpreted. There are clear cases where the way in which the data is presented is driving towards a specific answer.

Case Rates

China’s case growth looks artificially flat. Presenting fatality or case rates which have not been normalized by population size seems like deliberate manipulation of data.

Sweden – Good or Bad?

Sweden followed a different plan on social distancing. The graph on the left is presented to make Sweden look bad – more fatalities. The graph on the right is presented to make Sweden look good by choosing a peer group with less fatalities. The graphs below are based on the same information and presented by the same organization.