Although it’s been a while since I’ve thought data could actually change the actions of the ‘leaders’, I do follow some places. The Chicago updates are one example, and the stats out of King County, Washington are another.
For a long time, this page had the actual breakdown of cases/hospitalizations/deaths between the vaccinated and unvaccinated right on the main page. It looked like this:
This was from early September when the vaccine stats were still pretty good. Since then, I’ve watched the efficacy numbers come tumbling down, even with the ‘adjustments’ made by the county. The death rate had plummeted from the ‘30x’ you see here down to 16x. I was wondering how they were going to make this inconvenient data disappear. Yesterday I got my answer:
Now we compare unvaccinated people to boosted people! And we don’t JUST adjust for age, we now adjust for TIME! Of course, there may be a few problems:
As more people become fully vaccinated, the size of the unvaccinated population in some demographic and geographic groups begins to approach zero. In some King County zip codes and subgroups of King County residents, due to imprecision in official King County population estimates, we are observing more vaccinated individuals than the total population.
So they’re using estimates that in some cases proclaim there are more vaccinated people than actual people in an area. This wildly overestimates the vaccinated population and make the unvaccinated seem more at risk than they are.
In addition, gone are the charts below this where we could see the ACTUAL stats for the differing vax categories. Now the whole graph has been ‘adjusted.’ Luckily (for now) we can still see the actual data for the last 30 days. Take a look at what we see when we click that details box for deaths:
The data (the only actual data on the page!) shows vaccinated people make up 55% of deaths, and that ‘30x’ protection we saw above has dropped to 6.6x. Yet with another round of data ‘adjusting’ and moving the goalposts (again), the county makes it seem as if the vaccines are working.
This is a perfect example of how government can screw up even the easiest tasks. Public health officials should simply provide us with honest data in an easy-to-understand format. But since they went into this with a ‘get people vaxxed’ attitude, they’re constantly fiddling with the numbers trying to make it seem like a good idea still. This governmental tunnel vision hampers our ability to make informed healthcare decisions, while also destroying whatever trust these agencies had remaining. The public health officials have nobody to blame but themselves when we no longer listen to them.
But then we get accused of misinformation! Such a strange world.
One could cynically argue that this is one task the government didn't screw up.
In the "covid dashboards" I check weekly-- two different states-- we see the exact same thing. Failure to report raw numbers. Insistence on reporting "case rates" and supposed efficacy rate of the vaccines. Continued labeling of all who don't meet their standards of "fully vaccinated" as "unvaccinated." I'd love to see an example of a single state, county, city, or hospital in the U.S. that doesn't do at least one of these things.
Is there any way this way of reporting covid and vaccine data wasn't orchestrated and isn't being followed fairly successfully-- despite the obvious inconveniences and greater amount of number crunching required? It seems like nobody missed the memo here. (I would also note that the U.S., unlike some other countries, seems to be avoiding a "Recovered" section on the ubiquitous covid dashboard. Why not proudly display a statistic that other nations have used patriotically? Again, I am asking as a cynical person, not a confused one.)