I think Gov. Murphy needs some ‘woke’ help with numbers
Woke Zombie - @foogatwo - describes herself as a “data loving Jersey girl” on her Twitter bio.
She has also become one of the most outspoken critics of the way Gov. Phil Murphy has been handling the coronavirus pandemic, specifically the way in which statistics are handed out.
Basically, she thinks we’re not being told the whole story, and to her, the whole story isn’t half as bad as the story Murphy and his team presents.
And this isn’t COVID-denial stuff; this is hard math Ms. Zombie is spitting out daily on her Twitter account. Furthermore, she says she has been consulting with “several news outlets” to help them understand the data and form questions to ask Murphy at his press briefings.
After having a back and forth conversation with her, and understanding what it is she’s doing, I have to say: I’d rather have her giving the daily updates.
Now before we go on, understand this about me: I believe the original lockdown was the correct call. I believe the current quasilockdown is mostly also the right call, as the whole goal is to keep hospitals from being flooded with COVID patients. Ms. Zombie disagrees, believing that decisions should have been left to individuals based on their “risk profile.” We both agree that schools should be open.
But when Ms. Zombie parses the data … well, doubts creep in about the current state of affairs, and unless Murphy and his team actually take some of her ideas and put them into the daily briefings, the doubts are going to continue.
First, know this: Ms. Zombie has the chops. She told me she has a BS in Biochemical Engineering and an MS in Chemical Engineering, has worked in an engineering capacity for 20+ years, and her job is all about “data analysis” and “engineering modeling.” In short: She knows her way around numbers. She says she has spent her career “sifting through, analyzing, interpreting and presenting data in a form that is easily understood.”
And what does she see?
“Daily updates should be more informative,” she said. “Cases should be broken down by time. With newest cases, clearly, being focused on. Same with hospitalizations and deaths. As an example, the state will report ‘5,000 new cases’ today, but when you look at the breakdown, you’ll find that only 3,000 of those were from illness onset or tests in the last 7 days, since that’s close to the window of infectiveness. The rest aren’t even pertinent from a public health standpoint.”
She continues ...
“Another example: Since December began, the state has added thousands of cases from the summer into their ‘newly reported’ numbers. This is a bit disingenuous. A final example: They’ll report 90 ‘new’ deaths, but when you look at the illness onsets, you find that many of them are from months ago, some are even from March.”
This is easily her biggest issue with the numbers, and quite frankly, it is quickly becoming mine. One reason? Because the RT - rate of transmission - number is going to be different based on caseload and timeframe. In short: I don’t care about a positive test from October. It has zero bearing on the situation today.
Before we go any further, please note Ms. Zombie is not a COVID-denier. She also doesn’t think there’s some nefarious plot at work, doesn’t think the governor is purposefully being misleading. She just thinks the numbers we’re being given need more context, and she is just pushing back on Murphy’s “data determines decisions” mantra and is demanding daily accountability. Truth be told, we all should be.
By the way, this isn’t simple work Ms. Zombie is doing. She keeps track of day-over-day changes to each case, hospitalization, and death graphs. So each day, when new numbers are announced and get plotted by the state on the right graph by time, she can determine how many are new, how many are old, etc.
I asked her about the current wave, how many infections reported daily are actually “new,” in the seven-day window of when coronavirus is at its most infectious. Her answer? “About 40% to 50%.”
This is important information, obviously. It’s also a lot to take in. I asked her in a perfect world, what she would want to see released every day.
“Infectious cases. New deaths. It’s as simple as ‘we had 5,000 reported positive tests, 3,000 of those are from the last 7 days,” she said. “Then the public (or the dashboard) could graph infectious cases, because that’s what matters to public health. The actuaries can go back and fill in the illness onset data for completeness sake. Instead, the messaging is based on negativity and fear. We had 91 deaths yesterday! But 18 of those occurred from illnesses that were upwards of 200 days old. Then that leads to skepticism because how can you trust the data?”
I touched on this very topic - trusting the data - back in summer. Now that we’re back in the thick of coronavirus, trusting the data becomes even more important.
I am imploring Gov. Murphy to be more forthright with the information he provides. Give us all the numbers. We shouldn’t have to depend on anonymous Twitter accounts for facts.