From the We Still Suck At Data Department:
As schools begin to reopen and Gov. Greg Abbott faces pressure to relax shutdown measures, it is impossible to determine where Texas stands on a COVID-19 metric that has guided the governor’s decisions on when to tighten or loosen restrictions on businesses and public activity.
Over the past week and a half, the state began reporting coronavirus data from a backlog of 500,000 viral tests that officials say accumulated because of coding errors from Quest Diagnostics, Walgreens and CHRISTUS Health — all private entities that process the tests.
The result has been an ongoing miscalculation of the “positivity rate,” the rate at which people test positive for the virus.
Last week, it reached as high as 24.5 percent, and suddenly dipped back down again to about 11 percent this week as more backlogged tests were included in the data. Abbott has said a sustained positivity rate below 10 percent would allow for further reopenings in the state.
The influx of backlogged tests, dating as far back as March, has also exposed a convoluted reporting system that requires state officials to receive lab results, send them back to counties and wait for them to return to the State Department of Health Services before counting them.
The result is a mess of information reported recently to the public in “data dumps” that include test results from months prior, skewing statewide coronavirus statistics and positivity rates.
“The timing of it is horrible because it’s right at the beginning of opening the schools, when you want your data to be as accurate as possible, and it’s not,” said Darrell Hale, a Republican commissioner in Collin County.
The county on Wednesday pasted a disclaimer to its COVID reporting site declaring “no confidence” in the state’s numbers, which Hale said have ballooned in recent days even as lab-confirmed COVID-19 hospitalizations have declined.
[…]
Abbott faulted private labs for the glitches, as well as technological issues in the state’s own reporting system, which did not have the capacity to process more than 48,000 tests per day until Aug. 1. The state did not disclose the issue as it built up throughout July, when as many as 67,000 tests were conducted each day.
It may well be that the private labs can’t keep up with the demand. But:
1. Greg Abbott knew about this problem for at least a few weeks without ever saying anything about it.
2. The positivity rate was and is one of Abbott’s key metrics that were supposed to guide how and when we reopened things. Greg Abbott is currently not allowing local health authorities to make their own decisions about whether it is safe to open schools even though the data that we all need to know what the risks are cannot be trusted.
3. Greg Abbott continues to support and defend the federal government and its completely disastrous response to the pandemic, even though the federal government is the one entity in the country that could have marshaled the responses to meet the demand for testing. Nearly six months into this crisis, the federal government, under Donald Trump, which Greg Abbott supports, has made zero headway on this issue.
So yeah. Our data sucks, we are reaping the consequences of that failure, and the responsibility for it in this state rests with Greg Abbott.
The data suck because the tests are unreliable, and were rushed to market in a great big hurry, and there is no uniform standard of the virus particles that need to be detected for the test to be used. PCR testing was never intended for diagnosis. Read the NY Times article about a whooping cough fake demic called “Faith in Quick Test Leads to Epidemic that Wasn’t.”
The federal government has done an incredible job to respond to this situation. The US has done more testing than the rest of the world combined. When Pres. Trump mentioned this, all the reporter could say was, “why do you gotta make it a competition?” The US has spent a few trillion dollars on the response. The novel corona virus had a slight mutation when it arrived in Europe and the Americas, which made it have a stickier spike, and easier for it to infect people. The US has a large population of high risk people, many elderly, many obese, and a large number of people who have survived serious health conditions (due to better medical care in the modern age). The US also is the only country that has a population of such diverse ethnic backgrounds, plus a large nation with a variety of climates, terrain, local economies and industries, and population densities. Overall the federal government has done a great job.