Tag Archives: Centers for Disease Control

CDC Sows Covid Case-Fatality Confusion

15 Wednesday Apr 2020

Posted by in Data Integrity, Pandemic

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The Centers for Disease Control has formally decided to inflate statistics on coronavirus deaths by adding so-called “probable” cases to the toll. This news follows the announcement yesterday that New York decided to add, in one day, about 4,000 deaths from over the past month to its now “probable” Covid-19 death toll. So much for clean accounting! We have a confirmed death toll up to April 14th. We have a probable death toll after. The error in timing alone introduced by this abrupt adjustment impairs efforts to track patterns of change. Case fatality rates are rendered meaningless. Data integrity, which was already weak, has been thrown out the window by our public heath authorities.

It’s no longer necessary for a deceased patient to have tested positive for Covid-19:

“A probable case or death is defined as one that meets clinical criteria such as symptoms and evidence of the disease with no lab test confirming Covid-19. It can also be classified as a probable case if there are death or other vital records listing coronavirus as a cause. A third way to classify it is through presumptive laboratory evidence and either clinical criteria or evidence of the disease.”

Consider the following:

  • to date, more than 80% of patients presenting symptoms sufficient to meet testing guidelines have tested negative for Covid-19;
  • the most severe cases of Covid-19 and other respiratory diseases are coincident with significant co-morbidities;
  • “probable” cases appear to be concentrated among the elderly and infirm, whose regular mortality rate is high.

Deaths involving mere symptoms, or mere symptoms and co-morbidities, and even deaths of undetermined cause, are now more likely to be over-counted as Covid-19 deaths. This is certain to distort, and I believe overcount, Covid-19 deaths. Of course, this was already happening in some states, as I mentioned last week in “Coronavirus Controversies“.

One of the charts I’ve presented in my Continue%20reading Coronavirus “Framing” posts tracks Covid-19 deaths. The change in these cause-of-death guidelines will make continued tracking into something of a farce. I’d be tempted to deduct the one-day distortion caused by the New York decision, but then the count will still be distorted going forward by the broader definition of Covid-19 death.

The only possible rationale for these decisions by New York and the CDC is that testing is still subject to severe rationing. I have my doubts, as the number of daily tests has stabilized. On the other hand, I have heard anecdotes about hospitals with large numbers of respiratory patients who have not been tested! And they are intermingling all of these patients?? I’m not sure I can reconcile these reports. Surely the patients meet the guidelines for testing. Perhaps the CDC’s decision is associated with an effort to spread testing capacity by allowing only new patients to be tested, counting those already hospitalized as presumptively Covid-infected. And if they aren’t already, they will be! A decision to count deaths within that group as “probable” Covid deaths  would fit conveniently into that approach, but that would be wildly misguided and perverse.

I’m obviously cynical about the motives here. I don’t trust government accounting when it bears on the credit or blame for crisis management. Who stands to gain from a higher Covid death toll? The CDC? State health authorities? “Hot spots” vying for federal resources?

A consistent approach to attributing cause of death would have been more useful for gauging the direction of the pandemic, but as I’ve said, there will always be uncertainty about the true Covid-19 death toll. Ultimately, the best estimates will have to rely on calculations of “excess deaths” in 2020 compared to a “normal” level from a larger set of causes. In fact, even that comparison will be suspect because the flu season leading up to the Covid outbreak was harsh. Was it really the flu later in the season?

Left’s Pandemic Response: Politics As Usual

17 Tuesday Mar 2020

Posted by in Health Care, Pandemic, Regulation

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The Left asserts that President Trump dismissed and dismantled the nation’s Pandemic Response Team. That’s bullshit. So is the claim that the CDC was defunded. The news media and certain pundits have helped to feed this narrative. Or, as Glenn Reynolds calls those pundits, “Democrat operatives with bylines”.

First of all, the team in question was not at the CDC, a fact that hasn’t always been clear from the commentary on this issue. It was a team of White House overseers at the National Security Council’s “Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense”. What happened was this: the senior director of that team resigned after John Bolton was appointed to head the NSC. Bolton might have wanted him out, but what we know is the director resigned. Subsequently, that team was folded into another directorate as part of an long-overdue consolidation. Health experts from the team remain on the NSC staff today. Yet Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH)—and many others since—had the temerity to charge that Trump had fired “the entire Whilte House pandemic team”. Well, at least he didn’t imply that it was the CDC.

Tim Morrison wrote the following in the Washington Post yesterday:

“Because I led the very directorate assigned that mission, the counterproliferation and biodefense office, for a year and then handed it off to another official who still holds the post, I know the charge is specious. …

When I joined the National Security Council staff in 2018, I inherited a strong and skilled staff in the counterproliferation and biodefense directorate. This team of national experts together drafted the National Biodefense Strategy of 2018 and an accompanying national security presidential memorandum to implement it; an executive order to modernize influenza vaccines; and coordinated the United States’ response to the Ebola epidemic in Congo, which was ultimately defeated in 2020.”

This assessment at Brietbart.com quotes former senior NSC official Richard Goldberg:

“Weird. A year later I was inside the NSC working with talented global health/biodefense professionals who coordinated an incredibly effective response to Ebola. They’re still there. Working hard. On .”

It’s true that Bolton sought to eliminate red tape, duplication, and bureaucracy within the NSC, and that was wholly justified. According to Morrison, the NSC staff quadrupled from the 1990s through the second Obama term. Pandemics are supposed to be the CDC’s purview, but the proliferation of administrative layers is what happens as government grows uncontrollably. Leslie Eastman at Legal Insurrection questions whether the U.S. needs a permanent “Pandemic Response Team” in the White House. She quotes GOP Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel:

“JAN 7: CDC established a coronavirus incident management system, two days before China announced the outbreak. … Pelosi began Week 3 of withholding her sham impeachment articles. 

JAN 21: The CDC activated its emergency operations center to provide ongoing support to confront coronavirus. …What were Congressional Democrats focused on? Writing their opening arguments for their bogus impeachment trial.”

Well, bully for the CDC. As for “defunding the CDC”, the facts are this: the proposed budget submitted to Congress by the Trump Administration in February, but never passed, did indeed include cuts to the CDC’s budget, which has grown over the years as it expanded its mission from fighting infectious diseases to matters like obesity, racism, and questions of social justice. The cuts proposed by Trump, however, were primarily to state grants. Actually, the proposal called for increased CDC staffing, and it funded all programs related to infectious diseases. But no matter, because that proposal is unlikely to become part of any appropriations bill that would pass Congress.

True to form, the Left plays politics in the middle of a national crisis. When the Trump Administration told airlines that it was considering banning flights from China in late January, it was called racist. Now, of course, he hasn’t done enough. A huge irony, however, is that Trump’s biggest mistake was in trusting the FDA and the CDC’s authority to develop and regulate testing for the coronavirus. They botched it. In a classic case of over-regulation, they prohibited hospitals and labs from conducting tests developed privately or by academic researchers, insisting that everyone wait for the “approved” test to be distributed. Then, the test they released in early February was flawed, costing additional weeks before testing was available.