I decided from the beginning to only focus on COVID deaths, and maybe intubation rates. Everything other measure seemed too fuzzy and ripe for manipulation. D

I decided from the beginning to only focus on COVID deaths, and maybe intubation rates. Everything other measure seemed too fuzzy and ripe for manipulation. Death is a pretty definitive finding. But even this death metric is fraught with issues of “death from COVID” v. “death with COVID”. Deaths among the elderly are often ascribed to just “old age”…nobody cared about exact root causes until COVID came along. Most of the fatalities came from the “under-forensic-ed” elderly population and (I read somewhere…source needed) hospitals got increased financial compensation if a patient was coded as a COVID patient. Who is doing the forensics and what is their motivation? So even assigning a cause of death by COVID is a mess, but less than the mess of defining “COVID cases”. Modulo the “cause of death” issue, fortunately, for COVID deaths, the CDC has a nice website that presents the relevant National and State data https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm Ignore the silly “red +” over the data — just compare the deaths by week (in blue bars) to the expected deaths (as presented by the orange line). (Any “statistically significant” overage gets a “red +” no matter how trivial the excess, so it distorts the essential trends. And the height of the “red +” over the data is the same no matter if it is one death over or 1000 deaths over the threshold for that week. Really questionable chart design veering into “lying with statistics” territory.)