We are seeing many people trying to bring out all of these different numbers about how more or fewer people this that and the other thing. They are all an exercise in futility. There is one number which is not able to be skewed at all and is the one number which matters. That is how there were so many more deaths over these last few weeks than any other year and any other time period.
Anyone who compared this to the flu is way off base.
That being said, the numbers game is being played in so many different ways by politicians. Every update announces a running tally of positives. Relatively meaningless numbers that reflect the availability of testing more than anything. That’s why you see some states that appear to have 10% mortality rates. How about this? Test only those with severe breathing distress symptoms and admitted to ICU and I will show you 60% mortality rates for the virus.
Random antibody testing and new hospital admissions and intubations should be the gold standard and really the only standard of measure. Deaths and excess deaths are somewhat helpful but mostly a lagging indicator. Actually positive tests MAY be marginally helpful not as a raw number to hype, but when put in context of testing trends and percent positive trends. Politicians are highlighting positive numbers as if they still all exist. There are not 126,000 positive cases in New Jersey right now. There are a fraction of that number who are still positive.
What we need to be provided with is localized hard numbers. How many transports to hospitals in the last three days in Lakewood? Was there even a single one? How many hospitalizations in a county are from the general population and relevant to the public at large and how many are from nursing homes and less relevant to the general population? Everything else is pretty much hype or manipulation of numbers to the point that the data is relatively meaningless. I get that politicians want to hype it so people will be scared out of a sense of complacency but its really time to depoliticize the data by comparing it to the Korean War hurricane Sandy 911 or whatever and release specific hard numbers and trends to the public regardless of whether they support the current plan of action.