Report slams short-term virus data
Lawyer says 2-week snapshot can cause ‘unrepresentative’ results
A watchdog report took the state to task for moving toward short-term analyses of the coronavirus response and away from cumulative numbers.
The Pioneer Institute published a piece by area lawyer David Clancy arguing that the state’s shift from using cumulative data to information from a rolling two-week window can create confusion.
Clancy pointed specifically to ages of death as an example. For months, the state report’s page on that included all COVID deaths, and the average age of death was that of everyone who had died of the virus since it first came to the area. But then in mid-August that changed, and now the death data is just from the two weeks before each given report.
That means far fewer pieces of data are included in the calculation, meaning small week-to-week quirks can cause more dramatically different and “unrepresentative” results, he said.
“There are some advantages to showing a more recent time period — but there are also disadvantages to showing only that,” Clancy told the Herald. “And the problem could be totally resolved by just doing both.”
He said there’s a benefit to having the more recent numbers broken out so the state can see what the latest trends are — but that that can mask some of the broader facts of the disease. For example, the twoweek window bits of data about the average age of death, hospitalization and diagnosed case have skewed higher, potentially telling people that the virus is less dangerous to younger people than it is.