The U.S. Still Doesn't Have Good COVID-19 Data. Here's Why That's a Problem - TIME
[CAVEAT: references Leana Wen, whom I don’t personally consider reputable regarding Covid, but does dispute her opinions & I found some of the other information valuable if more accurate than her portion]
So glad to see this article's been mentioned already. Yes, Wen is nuts, I agree. When I saw she was quoted I *almost* closed it out, but didn't.
I think this gets to one of our core problems going forward. The people who don't want there to be good data have done a really good job at making sure we don't have any good data. It takes effort to track and collect good data. It takes a lot less effort to not have it, and that's where we're at.
I've thought a lot about this recently as I see people arguing about "COVID numbers are down" and "Less people are dying of COVID." I don't get into it, because if you just look at the raw data it sure looks like those are both true. But it's disingenuous(and I don't in any way mean to imply that all of the people saying that are purposefully disingenuous), because it's comparing apples and oranges. The data that we have today is not equivalent to what we used to get. It's not collected as fastidiously as it used to be and in many cases the criteria have changed significantly over time.
Where does that leave us? As far as I can tell the only fairly reliable data sets that we really have moving forward are work hours missed, because economists will definitely track that, and excess mortality, because after all is said and done it's hard(er) to hide the bodies.
Anything else is blurry, fudged or otherwise obfuscated now to make whatever point people want to make with it. This is going to make it *really* hard to change anything going forward. Add this to the Biden administration ending the emergency declaration in a few months and I suspect we're stuck in "you do you" public health hell indefinitely.
@BE To redirect back to your main point, the constant obfuscation on so many critical Covid-related points, which I believe is mostly intentional, is maddening. Can we not agree on the most basic metrics? Where are we if we can’t? I personally doubt I’d ever trust the CDC again.
I'm afraid the "What if we can't" answer is that we can't and that just leads public health officials to throw up their hands and go "Oh well. Who knows? You do you!"
@BE We are lost in the woods & just recognized we are where we originally started.