Lies, Damn Lies, and COVID

Florida is disguising its COVID deaths.

More people are dying from it than they let on.

Florida's governor may be running for president in 2024. 

Ron DeSantis' story is that Florida doesn't have vaccination and mask mandates, yet its death rates are just as good as other states' experience. See? He did it right, he says.

Classmate Rob Fowler looked closely at the statistics and uncovered an anomaly. Florida is gaming the system.

Rob Fowler is a retired Computer Science researcher who specialized in improving the performance of supercomputers ("It costs as much as a power forward and occupies the space of a basketball court.") He retired just a few months before COVID-19 hit, so he said he put his plans for golf, travel, and get-togethers on hold. Now he does gardening and art. 

Guest Post by Rob Fowler

               Lies, Damned Lies, and COVID

From the emergence of the very first cases of Sars-COV-2, a.k.a., COVID-19, in the United States it has been treated in some circles as less of a medical and public health crisis and more of a political issue that reflects on the reputations of those in charge.  Right from the beginning from one side we’ve heard: “It’s phony.” “It’s a Chinese Communist attack on America.”  “There will be 15 cases and then it will disappear.” “Why is there so much testing?  If we don’t test there won’t be diagnoses and the problem will go away.” “It’s over-reported to make us look bad.”  

Right from the start, Florida led the charge to control the flow of information: Forbidding local officials from issuing their own reports; and going so far as to fire (and prosecute) Rebekah Jones for trying to keep the state COVID dashboard alive and up-to-date. Other states have restricted the free flow of information, but not nearly as much came to public light.

From the start of the pandemic, I’ve been interested in examining the reports to try to understand and model the trends. Given both motives and opportunities for restricting and otherwise manipulating data, one needs a critical (cynical?) eye. An increasingly widespread consensus is that “excess deaths” statistics may be the only data one can trust. 

In the summer of 2021 Florida did two things that changed their reporting practices. Instead of releasing daily updates on a by-county basis, Florida released statewide numbers at two-week intervals. They slow-walked the release of death information, with a low-ball figure that is updated later, going back several months. The data was out of date and over-aggregated, but I expected the numbers to converge within a month or two.

Then, since November, something strange happened. Despite reporting huge case rates that considerably exceeded the rates of other large states, the reported death rates went suspiciously low and stayed for weeks on end. For example, today, January 1, 2022, The Guardian’s seven-day figures lead off with: California, 225,346 new cases and 394 deaths; Texas, 104,837 cases, 422 deaths; and Florida, 302,179 cases, 157 deaths. Note that California has almost twice the population of Florida. This has been the pattern since around the end of October.

Inquiring minds have to ask: What is going on? Has Florida, a hotbed of anti-vaccine, anti-masking, and anti-distancing behavior somehow pulled off a miracle? Will this miracle be used in Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign? Even though the anti-vaxxers seem to believe that Remdisvir is a deadly poison, has Florida discovered the key to avoiding death-by-COVID?  If not, what’s happening?

Then I discovered this interactive CDC tool adjacent to the Excess Deaths. It lists all total deaths, as well as those caused by COVID, pneumonia, and influenza in various combinations. The difference between the two pneumonia columns yields “non-COVID pneumonia." I extracted some data for the week ending 12/04/21 to give “slow data” a chance to find its home. I selected Florida and a couple others for comparison. I added a column with the state population to make it easy to compare sizes.

Note that for most rows the number of pneumonia deaths is not much larger, nor much smaller, than the number of COVID deaths.  Florida sticks out like a sore thumb because the number of pneumonia deaths not associated with COVID is 219, (i.e. 315 minus 96), a third larger than all the COVID deaths. Either there’s some serious data fiddling going on or Florida is suffering from, and concealing, a pneumonia epidemic much more deadly than COVID!  

Aside:  Since November, North Carolina's overall death rate is grossly under-reported in the CDC tool, though other sources quote reasonable totals. I've contacted the CDD to try to get an explanation or correction. 

The tool shows that three months ago Florida’s number of deaths was higher than California despite the disparity in population, but much less than Texas’s with the comparable population. There doesn’t seem to be anything blatantly out of whack in the pneumonia numbers; everywhere most of the pneumonia is associated with COVID. While Florida's non-COVID recent pneumonia are highly suspicious, many of the other states are showing recent trends that bear continued scrutiny. 

Note that this doesn’t count other deaths that might be associated with COVID. Snopes  These statistics do not account for deaths from “long COVID”, nor due to people being unable to get non-COVID critical care. 

For I while I was completely mystified and my only model for the anomalies was outright fraud. Then I noticed anecdotes about people “recovering from COVID but still dying in the hospital”. 

It turns out that CDC answers the question “When can I stop self-isolating  and consider myself recovered?” If you get symptoms, then 10 days after the test or start of symptoms, fever-free for 24 hours, and improving symptoms. It seems like reasonable guidance for mild cases. In severe cases, if hospitalized, extending the period up to 20 days “may be warranted." Regardless, positive tests may persist for months and are not regarded as continued disease.

Thus, under CDC guidelines someone in the hospital could be deemed to have “recovered” if they survive for 10 days after the first positive test and then have any period during which some unspecified “symptoms” improved.   

From a certain perspective, therefore, if a person survives 11 days after symptoms or testing positive and then dies, the reporting authority may have a rationale for determining that the person “recovered from COVID” and therefore does not include COVID as a contributing cause of death. On the standard U.S Certificate of Death there’s are spaces to enter up to four conditions, but no requirement all be listed, and no place to note fevers and symptoms. The final authority in reporting deaths and causes may be an employee of the local health office. This gives local officials under political influence, a huge amount of flexibility in reporting death causes. Here is an example.