Clean Data
Dirty lies
A little housekeeping…. SAT style-
Virus: Disease
SARS(Severe acute respiratory syndrome)-CoV-2: COVID-19
HIV(Human immunodeficiency virus) :AIDS
Data below was recorded from March 13th, 2020.
There are approximately 95,972 deaths due to the flu this year and counting, we know this because it's fairly easy to test. The rapid influenza diagnostic tests (RIDTs) can tell you within 15 minutes whether or not you have it. The issue with these test is that false negatives occur quite frequently. This is not the best test we have, but it is a very common, low cost method. And we can at least say with some mild accuracy that the results give us a baseline for data. Even the fact that we can report on it's false positives are a good sign for data collection because we're certain that the results still need completion.
China, the world's most populous country, has a reported 80,814 (as of Friday, March 13) with a recorded 3,177 deaths. China, has been able to manufacture their own tests as well as utilize the tests recommended by the World Health Organization(WHO).
South Korea has created their own test and is doing about 15,000 tests a day. We are well within 50+ days of the first outbreak in the United States and haven't been able to manufacture 10,000 tests yet (as of March 13).
India, the world's second most populous country, has conducted 5,000 COVID-19 tests according to the WHO. But India has only reported 74 confirmed COVID-19 cases and one death (as of Friday, March 13).
If you're not a geography buff, India and China are adjacent like New Jersey and New York. And if you're not a tourism buff, nobody travels the globe like the Chinese. They blew everyone else out the water with 150 million travelers in 2018. It's estimated that by 2030, close to half of the tourism done in the world will be done by someone from China. Furthermore, more than a quarter million Chinese visitors toured India in 2018.
Let me rephrase: India, with a population ranking second on the planet, and next door neighbors to the country where people love to travel and where the virus originated has only 74 confirmed cases, with 1 death.
And like India, a GDP of $2.5 trillion, the United States ( GDP of $19 trillion) faces similar data efficiency issues. As our president exclaimed last week, testing is not an issue This begs the question: why are nation-states entitled to selecting the facts that they want to distribute?
This isn't news to you I'm sure. Every administration has lied to protect it's reputation. This current administration is no different. However, what is bothersome is that the misinformation has deleterious effects on the well being of a nation. Our health system, as we learned, can't do heavy lifting in times like this. The CDC, as we learned also, opted to not take the recommended tests the WHO provided the rest of the world, of which 60 other countries accepted. Neither of these two things are wrongful, but why lie about the data thus far? People rely on this information to make decisions regarding their well being. Microbial pandemics leave everyone in the dark, the only way to turn the light on is to tell the truth. Lying in times like this is nihilistic.
Just as the Obama administration dropped the ball on the Flint Michigan water debacle, the Trump adminstration has dropped the ball on this. There needs to be a consensus on how we collect our data and then how we distribute it.
Lesson: until you can get tested, don't trust your sources. The data is dirty.
But this below is clean.
