Data on this page are reported voluntarily to CDC by each jurisdiction’s health department. CDC encourages all jurisdictions to report the most complete and accurate information...
Accuracy of Data
CDC does not know the exact number of COVID-19 illnesses, hospitalizations, and deaths for a variety of reasons...there are delays in reporting and testing...there may be differences in how jurisdictions confirm numbers.
There is generally less reporting on the weekends and holidays.
If the number of cases or deaths reported by CDC is different from the number reported by jurisdiction health departments, data reported by jurisdictions should be considered the most up to date. The differences may be due to the timing of the reporting and website updates.
When I think about this, first posted here on July 1, or re-read it, I am just gabbersmocked. I would have imagined this to be the the work of the national health department of, like, Chad. But,
"This is the United States of America!"as the 46th president of the U.S. says.
I am not going to repeat my bitches from July 1. I will add this one: Since the national Centers--Why is that plural? To sound more disorganized?--for Disease Control does not compel local jurisdictions to report, I assume private institutions like Johns--Why is that plural?--Hopkins, certainly the New York Times, cannot compel production of numbers? I do not how that could be otherwise. So Hopkins is reputed to report the numbers "in real time," they report out in exact numbers Cases and Deaths, up to the minute! But that is not true. What they are reporting is the exact number of voluntary reports they receive from the local jurisdictions on that date, not the actual numbers of Cases and Deaths. How could that be otherwise? Because of these "delays in reporting" we see dips "on the weekends and holidays"(of which this by the way is a two-fer)--which, give me my due, I have suspected and pointed out numerous times--when reporting volunteers are less numerous, and literally unreal spikes once the work week recycles back up.
When I was in college I studied political statistics and designed and administered a poll, and my professors had an adage, "Garbage in, garbage out," what you get is only as accurate as what you put into the poll question composition, the size and selection of the sample, and so on. Garbage in, garbage is out fits pretty neatly CDC's own description that it "does not know" the exact numbers.
Realizing this, undersigned counsel made the executive choice that Deaths reporting had to be more accurate than Cases reporting. Deaths have to be reported, there is no voluntariness to it, and the life/death line was a bright one, the "novel" Trump Virus diagnosis line a smudged one. Those statements are true. But. However. These are numbers of Deaths caused by the novel Trump Virus. The smudged Cases-of-Trump-Virus line smudges the Deaths-caused-by-Trump-Virus line.
So, with all of this contingency to the daily numbers the seminal trend lines, 3-day, 5-day, 7-day, 14-day, become averaged garbage. You can perfume the stink of the daily heaps by attenuation, which does in fact give a more consistent smell to the data but you are still perfuming garbage. If you put in daily numbers of garbage and you average that garbage over a sounds-good-to-me number of days, you can only get averaged garbage back out. That cannot be otherwise. And thus the graphs from any two authoritative sources do not look like they are even representing the same phenomena.
New York Times
Washington Post (labeled “reported”)
We can say only that in these two graphs see a decline in the line over a period of months.
So with those pointed disclaimers, here is Johns Hopkins' number of Deaths at post time:
129,673 cumulative total Americans Killed by Donald Trump during the Trump Epidemic with the Trump Virus.
We hold these truths to be self evident. Good night.
Accuracy of Data
CDC does not know the exact number of COVID-19 illnesses, hospitalizations, and deaths for a variety of reasons...there are delays in reporting and testing...there may be differences in how jurisdictions confirm numbers.
There is generally less reporting on the weekends and holidays.
If the number of cases or deaths reported by CDC is different from the number reported by jurisdiction health departments, data reported by jurisdictions should be considered the most up to date. The differences may be due to the timing of the reporting and website updates.
When I think about this, first posted here on July 1, or re-read it, I am just gabbersmocked. I would have imagined this to be the the work of the national health department of, like, Chad. But,
"This is the United States of America!"as the 46th president of the U.S. says.
I am not going to repeat my bitches from July 1. I will add this one: Since the national Centers--Why is that plural? To sound more disorganized?--for Disease Control does not compel local jurisdictions to report, I assume private institutions like Johns--Why is that plural?--Hopkins, certainly the New York Times, cannot compel production of numbers? I do not how that could be otherwise. So Hopkins is reputed to report the numbers "in real time," they report out in exact numbers Cases and Deaths, up to the minute! But that is not true. What they are reporting is the exact number of voluntary reports they receive from the local jurisdictions on that date, not the actual numbers of Cases and Deaths. How could that be otherwise? Because of these "delays in reporting" we see dips "on the weekends and holidays"(of which this by the way is a two-fer)--which, give me my due, I have suspected and pointed out numerous times--when reporting volunteers are less numerous, and literally unreal spikes once the work week recycles back up.
When I was in college I studied political statistics and designed and administered a poll, and my professors had an adage, "Garbage in, garbage out," what you get is only as accurate as what you put into the poll question composition, the size and selection of the sample, and so on. Garbage in, garbage is out fits pretty neatly CDC's own description that it "does not know" the exact numbers.
Realizing this, undersigned counsel made the executive choice that Deaths reporting had to be more accurate than Cases reporting. Deaths have to be reported, there is no voluntariness to it, and the life/death line was a bright one, the "novel" Trump Virus diagnosis line a smudged one. Those statements are true. But. However. These are numbers of Deaths caused by the novel Trump Virus. The smudged Cases-of-Trump-Virus line smudges the Deaths-caused-by-Trump-Virus line.
So, with all of this contingency to the daily numbers the seminal trend lines, 3-day, 5-day, 7-day, 14-day, become averaged garbage. You can perfume the stink of the daily heaps by attenuation, which does in fact give a more consistent smell to the data but you are still perfuming garbage. If you put in daily numbers of garbage and you average that garbage over a sounds-good-to-me number of days, you can only get averaged garbage back out. That cannot be otherwise. And thus the graphs from any two authoritative sources do not look like they are even representing the same phenomena.
New York Times
Washington Post (labeled “reported”)
So with those pointed disclaimers, here is Johns Hopkins' number of Deaths at post time:
129,673 cumulative total Americans Killed by Donald Trump during the Trump Epidemic with the Trump Virus.
We hold these truths to be self evident. Good night.
