[conspire] New CDC website for US testing

[Deirdre Saoirse Moen]

While I applaud the CDC’s much-belated effort reporting US testing efforts, perhaps they should have belayed the launch until they were out of alpha testing. Jesus, what a clusterfuck.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/05/cdc-publishing-covid-19-test-data/611764/

So, yesterday, Nate Silver mentioned some of the issues on Twitter, which I won’t go into here, but he’s at https://twitter.com/natesilver538 if anyone’s interested.


One of the issues in the Covid Tracking project’s data is that it is a record of a dataset at a point in time. So they get the state’s reported data at that point in time. Right? Right.

Unfortunately, over time, causes of death have changed and that’s *not* reflected in the historic data on the site, which is a known limitation. Here’s an example. Yes, I tweeted an autopsy report at Nate Silver yesterday, wtf was I thinking? It’s of the Feb 6 death in San Mateo CA.

https://twitter.com/deirdresm/status/1261754999371034624

You look at the Covid Tracking data for California, and it doesn’t list any deaths when the data starts in March: https://covidtracking.com/data/state/california


Anyhow, going to the CDC data tracker, https://www.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/ and selecting our county (San Mateo), it says there are 1602 cases and 66 deaths. Which actually happens to match county data, and it’s accurate for the few counties in the area I happen to know the data for. Los Angeles county’s weird, because it excludes Long Beach and Pasadena (and I totally get why, having lived in the area: basically, Pasadena has their shit together better than the county does, same as Long Beach).

I’m not going to trawl through the rest of the country though.


And my friend Courtney Milan (pen name), best known as a romance author but also formerly chemist, law professor, Supreme Court Clerk (and UNICODE emoji dinosaur advocate) criticizes a IMHE curve-fit COVID-19 : https://twitter.com/courtneymilan/status/1261795965347848192

I like her rehash stegosaurus-and-bees curve fit better: https://twitter.com/courtneymilan/status/1261802212805636096

Deirdre