CDC’s Reckless Lane Change: Fudging the COVID-19 Death Count

VirtualWright COVID-19

On April 14, New York announced that they would be adding more than 3,700 to the death total from the virus who were never actually tested. That’s a 50% increase. As of today, New York is reporting 8,811 confirmed deaths and 4,429 probable deaths, i.e. not tested.

This is being done because that what the CDC has requested.

So, right at the peak of deaths in this country, the CDC is asking everyone to inflate the numbers by including people who weren’t actually tested. Never mind that people who die from COVID-19 generally die of pneumonia and something like 3,600 people die every week from pneumonia in this country all throughout the year.

Here’s what it looks like on the plots of cumulative deaths. I’ve color coded in red starting on April 14 to clearly show the impact of what I call the inflated data. My source is worldometers.info and the big jump was added there as of April 16 although some increase was already being reported before the 3,700 were added. Suddenly we’ve moved into the fast lane:

And here’s the plot of death rate where I collect 3 samples per day (with a few exceptions):

Right after what appeared to be the peak it jumps up. Nothing like changing the rules in the middle of the game. In any case, while it clearly is going to change the total numbers I don’t expect it will change the timing. Every indication is that it will essentially be over at the end of this month. And, don’t forget, deaths follow infections by about three weeks. This means the peak of the infections was as much as three weeks ago and have been declining ever since. New York, as seems to be the case with most other places, doesn’t show the true epi curve (onset of symptoms) but look at the hospitalization graph as of today:


Richard J. Wright, a chemist and information technology specialist, has been tracking the official Covid-19 epidemic (SARS-CoV-2 virus) data and assessing our government’s disease progression modeling, plus responses, at virtualwright.com.

Trackbacks

  1. […] In Infections and Fatalities I wondered why there is absolutely no discernible change in the cumulative U.S. Deaths curve to reflect the effect of the shutdown. Here’s a zoomed in look at curve 5 which perfectly fit the data until everyone started inflating the data at the CDC’s request as I pointed out in Changing Lanes: […]

  2. […] Deaths are being inflated so that if you die of a drug overdose but also had the virus you’re counted as a COVID-19 death. Even so, it’s clear we have peaked. Hospitalizations are probably the only reliable metric left and clearly show a peak in the middle of March for all age groups and the beginning of April for people greater than 65 years old. […]

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