Data is only as good as its source. If you want perfectly accurate numbers, you need hospitals to report perfectly accurate data, and that's not happening.
It's not some grand conspiracy, though. There's no secret cabal of Rothschilds, Chinese communists, and Hollywood pedophiles who know exactly what's happening. It's just that human nature is what it is, and data collection for complex subjects is difficult and highly subjective.
If a 65-year-old has all the symptoms of Coronavirus and dies from acute respiratory failure, you can make a reasonably good guess they had COVID-19, so the doctor is likely to put that down and move on. They have other patients to treat; why spend more time on someone who's already dead where you're 80% sure you know the answer already?
Or imagine you're a nurse treating a 92-year-old with lots of underlying conditions. But you're freaked out about this COVID stuff because you watch the news every day. So when your patient dies, even though there are five different things that contributed, guess which one you're going to attribute it to—that's right, the one that was top-of-mind at the time.
States have different reporting requirements. Hospitals have different forms. Different physicians have different note-taking styles. If you have massive amounts of data, you can attempt to quantify and control for all of those things, and it's possible some academic 15 years from now will pore through archived databases and build a model taking all that into account, but that will just be their best guess; other researchers will come up with different guesses; sometimes they will build a model that they know will come up with a different result from the first researcher because that's the only way their paper will get attention.
There's human error and bias at every step of the process. No one will ever know the whole story.
You may be right. But once the information is out of the hands of the WHO there might be enough to put a fairly accurate picture from those other sources. Hopefully. Maybe.
Looking forward to real numbers once this is all over.
You know we'll never see them.
Nobody is ever going to see real numbers.
Data is only as good as its source. If you want perfectly accurate numbers, you need hospitals to report perfectly accurate data, and that's not happening.
It's not some grand conspiracy, though. There's no secret cabal of Rothschilds, Chinese communists, and Hollywood pedophiles who know exactly what's happening. It's just that human nature is what it is, and data collection for complex subjects is difficult and highly subjective.
If a 65-year-old has all the symptoms of Coronavirus and dies from acute respiratory failure, you can make a reasonably good guess they had COVID-19, so the doctor is likely to put that down and move on. They have other patients to treat; why spend more time on someone who's already dead where you're 80% sure you know the answer already?
Or imagine you're a nurse treating a 92-year-old with lots of underlying conditions. But you're freaked out about this COVID stuff because you watch the news every day. So when your patient dies, even though there are five different things that contributed, guess which one you're going to attribute it to—that's right, the one that was top-of-mind at the time.
States have different reporting requirements. Hospitals have different forms. Different physicians have different note-taking styles. If you have massive amounts of data, you can attempt to quantify and control for all of those things, and it's possible some academic 15 years from now will pore through archived databases and build a model taking all that into account, but that will just be their best guess; other researchers will come up with different guesses; sometimes they will build a model that they know will come up with a different result from the first researcher because that's the only way their paper will get attention.
There's human error and bias at every step of the process. No one will ever know the whole story.
You may be right. But once the information is out of the hands of the WHO there might be enough to put a fairly accurate picture from those other sources. Hopefully. Maybe.