Back when CDC had a real director, his name was Tom Frieden. He now heads an organization called Resolve to Save Lives, which has come out with a report on the woeful state of reporting by the states on important data about the Covid-19 pandemic.
Indicators critical to understanding the pandemic’s course were often missing, it found. Not a single state currently reports the average turnaround time of a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test, as press reports abound of tests in many regions taking a week or more to come back, a delay that renders testing nearly useless in controlling the disease’s spread. The test positivity rate goes unreported by 25% of states.
The test positivity rate is probably the single most important parameter -- it tells us if the state is doing enough testing, and gives an indication of the prevalence in the population. Also broadly lacking is data on contact tracing, and data that is reported is often unclear because of a lack of standard definitions. Of course we know why this is:
Despite good work by many states and a “tsunami of data points,” he said, “because of the lack of national leadership, we don’t have common standards, definitions, targets, or accountability.”And we know who is responsible -- where the buck stops.The US is “flying blind,” he said, questioning the current “obsession” with higher test numbers. If results are taking several days, if positive cases are rarely isolated, and if contacts are almost never warned, he said, then “we really have done very little good.”
The current number of cases in the United States exceeds the combined total in all of Europe, Africa, and Asia, said Frieden. He explained, “With 4% of the world’s population, we have one quarter of covid reported deaths. And during the 45 minutes of this briefing, more than 20 people will die from covid in the US and thousands more will become infected.”
4 comments:
Regarding lack of good data: Something has changed in this country. 60 years ago (yup, I've achieved geezerhood) a common way to make fun of some one, or group, for avoiding the facts was the "Ostrich with its head in the sand" meme. I haven't seen this in print or as a cartoon for decades, and I don't know of any simple replacement for that image.
At the risk of being pedantic, the phrase refers to the supposed fact that if an ostrich sees danger it will try to hide by burying just its head in the sand. Supposedly the ostrich thinks that if it can't see the threat then the threat can't see the ostrich. A ridiculous idea since a standing ostrich is hard to miss, even if you can't see its head.
Help me out here. Is there a simple way to heap scorn on someone for avoiding the facts in the hope that doing so will make the problem go away? Is it politically incorrect to criticize someone for avoiding reliable data that contradicts their claims?
We have easy access to massively more good information than we did 50 years ago. Yet provably false claims are not met with the derision they deserve for making such asses of themselves.
I've come up with just a few possibilities:
1) Con artists have become so skillful at cherry picking data that they can make it look like they have facts to backup any bullshit.
2) Americans are so afraid of math, or afraid of being seen as geeks if they're good at it, that they avoid any numerical argument. Logic, sadly, suffers the same fate.
3) We are truly living in a post modern world where any text (including numerical) means no more than what the reader sees in it.
I grew up in a country that saw itself as being pragmatic, "Don't choke me with your theories; if it works I'll use it." Not my favorite approach, but it was objective; "It works" and "It doesn't work" were respected data points. Ambiguous results weren't talked about much, but it was understood that you needed to do more work to fix that problem.
I don't see our public discourse operating under any recognizable paradigm now.
Oh, and by the way, that statistic about our death toll being greater than that of Africa, Asia, and Europe combined would make a great talking point for a certain candidate for President.
Well, it's one segment of the population that doesn't want to know the True Facts. That's the Faux News-watching, Rush Limbaugh-listening Ronald T. Dump-worshiping Republican party. The rest of us, I believe, do not wish to be ignorant.
Qualified agreement.
I'm sure that's true of most of your acquaintances, but the general population? Plato made a distinction between knowledge and "right opinion". Just because someone agrees with you doesn't mean that they really thought it through. Look at the reasons people give pollsters for their choices. And they likely fudged those responses a little in order to appear more 'thoughtful'.
People use their heads at their jobs, even jobs they hate; they husband that resource elsewhere. On popular media you'll find the most careful, analytical thinking on the sports channels. Only people like your friends watch any of the other programs that have some nuance.
OK, I overstated that, but people don't pay much attention to politics here because its bo-o-o-oring. You only get to vote for one of two bland, inoffensive candidates. Carrots or peas. Trump probably got a lot votes just because he was interesting.
It could be a lot more fun if we had some sort of instant runoff system. Then you could make the candidate you really like your first choice and put the safe one as your second (or later) pick.
Pity that we can't get there from here.
I agree that most people have low information about policy relevant issues. However, most of them are also willing to believe experts. Anthony Fauci is seen as trustworthy by far more people than see Orange Julius as trustworthy about the pandemic. Trust in Julius is pretty much limited to the cult. And the majority have come around about climate change, systemic racism, support environmental regulation, and so on. I would like for people to be more knowledgeable generally but as far as trusting expertise and believing that science is an honest, if sometimes flawed enterprise is what I'm really talking about here.
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