Florida scientist fired for refusing to manipulate Covid-19 data

Re:Florida scientist fired for refusing to manipulate Covid-... by Tagbert on Tuesday May 19, 2020 @03:26PM (#23239008)

Lay-people don’t really dig into the data and don’t compare i dates for changing stats. Tracking deaths by date of occurrence is much more useful than date of report, even if it means that you have to restate figures sometimes. We see that happen a lot with economic figures where they restart the previous month or quarter’s stats.

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Re:Florida scientist fired for refusing to manipulate Covid-... by rovolo on Tuesday May 19, 2020 @03:46PM (#23239290)

Restating the figures isn't necessarily bad. The issue with mortality revisions is that they're always revised upward; whereas the economic revisions can go either way.

Using date-of-death introduces a consistent bias where recent deaths are undercounted compared to earlier deaths. People care about whether deaths are currently slowing or increasing. Date-of-report may be inaccurate, but it doesn't bias the trajectory of deaths consistently in either direction.

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