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On the one hand I want to apply Hanlon's Razor ("Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"). But on the other hand there have

On the one hand I want to apply Hanlon's Razor ("Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"). But on the other hand there have been a lot of very dubious choices made through out this entire pandemic, choices where surely there must have been at least one person who objected but was overruled for some reason. Even NYC fudged its numbers early on by choosing to initially only report deaths where the infected person died in a hospital, after getting a positive test result. They were not initially counting people who chose to die at home, died in nursing homes, or died in hospitals before they were able to get one of the limited tests that were available. At some point when you look at the how the numbers are calculated and it is painfully obvious that the numbers are being calculated wrong you have to ask "how did this happen?" Surely there was at least one intelligent person along the way in Virginia who must have suggested "hey let's not mix these test numbers together" or in NYC at least one intelligent person who said "hey let's also count nursing home deaths". When it takes a public expose pointing out how wrong the numbers are in order to get the numbers corrected, that is a problem. It might be just a major case of brain drain in these public service roles, or it might be something more sinister.

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
But I don't think it's right to call these "fudged". It strikes me as the appropriate division of labor. Government administrators are responsible for reporting the data they've collected; it's pandemic modelers, not administrators, who are best equipped to determine which data is useful and what the data implies. Pandemic modelers realized they needed data on PCR tests only, so they told Virginia that and now they're getting it - the system worked! It'd be a different story if Virginia said "this is the number of test suitable for contact tracing we're doing", or NYC said "this is an unbiased estimate of the total mortality burden of covid-19 in our city". But I don't think they did.

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago

But I don't think it's right to call these "fudged". It strikes me as the appropriate division of labor. Government administrators are responsible for reporting the data they've collected; it's pandemic modelers, not administrators, who are best equipped to determine which data is useful and what the data implies. Pandemic modelers realized they needed data on PCR tests only, so they told Virginia that and now they're getting it - the system worked! It'd be a different story if Virginia said "this is the number of test suitable for contact tracing we're doing", or NYC said "this is an unbiased estimate of the total mortality burden of covid-19 in our city". But I don't think they did.