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Her actual complaint about the data [1]: Now a private citizen, Jones continues to take issue with the way the state is calculating its coronavirus positivit
by verteu 6y ago
Her actual complaint about the data [1]:
Now a private citizen, Jones continues to take issue with the way the state is calculating its coronavirus positivity rate. The official Florida site says there are more than 1.3 million "total people tested" in Florida, of which about 73,500 were positive, resulting in an "overall percent positive" rate of 5.4%.
But Jones says that figure is misleading.
"I actually wrote the script to create that data, so I know exactly what it looks like," she says, adding that she's audited it and checked it with several other statisticians to make sure it's correct.
She says that on the state's dashboard, any person who tests positive will be counted as a positive test only once, no matter how many times they test positive. But a person who tests negative will be counted over and over again each time they test negative for the coronavirus.
Jones says that because many residents, such as health care workers, require repeated testing, the state's dashboard is artificially deflating the true positivity rate.
[1] http://npr.org/2020/06/14/876584284/fired-florida-data-scientist-launches-a-coronavirus-dashboard-of-her-own http://npr.org/2020/06/14/876584284/fired-florida-data-scien...
- LatteLazy 6y agoThanks, that really clearly explains her claim.
- xlm1717 6y agoHer dashboard still shows the same positive numbers as the state dashboard. The difference is the state dashboard separates numbers by residents and non-residents, while her dashboard combines the numbers.
- fastglass 6y ago>any person who tests positive will be counted as a positive test only once, no matter how many times they test positive. But a person who tests negative will be counted over and over again each time they test negative for the coronavirus. Which is a reasonable assertion about "the data". This is where the point about her not being a data scientist comes into play, and needs to be cleared before going into anything else, such as her personal life/drama. She, like many others, including those in this comments section, are running afoul when it comes to familiarity with the subject matter of the data. You get counted as a positive case "only once", because (early on in theory) you only get the disease once. Whether that's true or not is beyond her paygrade, to say the least.
- CleaveIt2Beaver 6y agoThat's not even the crux of the issue, so maybe we should get a little introspective about our own qualifications while we're at it. The problem is that negative tests are counted each time, while positives are per-person. So one nurse could account for 100 negative tests, so the presentation is misleading.
- fastglass 6y ago>The problem is that negative tests are counted each time, while positives are per-person. The point I was making is that whether this is a problem or not is not a resolved scientific issue, which presupposes the data and presentation. Furthermore 'this' is a 2 fold issue: do you count negatives more than once; and, do you count positives more than once? These are 2 separate matters; however, I would say counting negatives more than once is the least controversial part.