It is interesting how “everyone” (not meaning here on cc, but in general) is the armchair quarterback looking at it all in hindsight and, usually smugly, stating they “knew” what was wrong or should have happened or whatever.
In reality, everything was new. None of us have experienced such a thing before. People were making their best guesses and moving forward, learning as they went along. Some guesses by chance were right and some were wrong. The key (at least to me) is learning from what worked, not getting hung up on the past.
I don’t expect perfection from any human. None of us are superhuman or able to look into the future as if it were the past, esp with something new.
Except that is not what Biden promised on January 21 last year. Within hours of his inauguration, the Prez sent out the Press Secy to declare: “sharing accurate information with the American people… transparency and truth to the government…” And this was after he ran and was elected on ‘listening to the science’.
Look, many of his senior appointees have worked in DC before and have experience with and in federal agencies. They have to have known that folks, including the press, mis-report data and others will misuse it. They can’t be that naive. (If they are, they should resign and let some folks with common sense assume those leadership positions.)
Yes, early on we were learning a lot, but two years in…teh American Academy of Pediatrics can’t get any data? This is a medical professional society, who presumably would not misuse data.
“They’ve known this for over a year and a half, right, and they haven’t told us,”
The best way to fight misinformation is to share way less data than what our public health apparatus knows? That is why a growing number of people will continue to have less trust in our systems and eventually ignore public health guidance. We love to blame misinformation for all that ails public discontent, but withholding important information can have a similar effect on how the public responds to Public Health guidance.
I was aware of Paxlovid as a treatment at the end of Jan when NYC started free delivery (with a prescription) to elderly. Was on our local news. My dad, in an assisted living facility in rural PA near where I grew up, got covid (fully vaxxed and boosted). He is on O2, due to COPD and a myriad of health issues due to smoking. It took days for his facility and I to get a response from his doc, who visits once per month. I knew of Paxlovid and had the printout of where it was available in PA-including at the doc’s town CVS. (Available on the PA Dept of Health) website.) Talking to my dad’s assisted living facility nurse-none of the other residents were prescribed Paxlovid upon diagnosis. They never heard of it. Finally got in touch w/doc office-they didn’t know about Paxlovid either. I had to inform them what it was and that it was available in their local CVS. Doc called CVS pharmacist and facility pharmacy and both pharmacists could not tell him if Mirtazapine was contraindicated. Since he responded to us on day 4, and he could not determine if Paxlovid could be taken with Mirtazapine, my dad did not get a prescription. ( My mom died of covid in assisted living last Christmas- just before vaxxes were available so I’m on high alert and just astonished at the lack of knowledge re available treatments.) IDK if Mirtazapine is contraindicated-some other antidepressants were. Dad has lingering productive cough, which he always has, but a bit worse. Telephone appt with pulmonologist this week. My point is there is a wide variety of knowledge out there, even among medical staff, in rural vs urban locations. IDK why.
From the article ‘Much of the withheld information could help state and local health officials better target their efforts to bring the virus under control. Detailed, timely data on hospitalizations by age and race would help health officials identify and help the populations at highest risk. Information on hospitalizations and death by age and vaccination status would have helped inform whether healthy adults needed booster shots. And wastewater surveillance across the nation would spot outbreaks and emerging variants early.’
The data is absolutely what should be driving the pandemic response. If the data shows that younger individuals don’t require a booster then that data should be shared. If the data shows that obesity is a major concern regarding hospitalizations then that should be shared. The response deserves to be data driven. The public deserves to know the complete set of information. Omitting portions does not build faith in the system. Why is it so bad to actually follow all of the data? Obviously there are different levels of risk for different individuals. One response does not fit all.
“Data” in not the same thing as “information”. I do not use these interchangeably.
In the past, when misinformation was the result of rumors and garbled half-truths. Releasing data could be helpful back then, since the misinformation was the result of a vacuum in the knowledge base.
That is no longer the case. Misinformation is being produced in a purposeful and focused manner by countries like Russia who want to disrupt out society, and by organizations with vested interest in keeping people fearful and mistrustful of experts and scientists.
The people who follow these sources of misinformation will never go to the press releases of the CDC and look at the data there. They will only consume the knowledge that is the result of the data being manipulated and cherry-picked to make it appear that it “proves” their points.
Moreover, these are massive amounts of data which are of little use to somebody who isn’t trained to deal with massive amounts of data. So simply making it available will not combat anything.
I’m not saying that hiding the data will help, or that the CDC should keep the data under wraps. It’s governmental data and should be available to the public. I’m just saying that preparing it for release to the public is not important.
I will make a bet. Once the data is released, nobody will change their minds. No matter what their own analysis of the data actually reveals, the COVID deniers will continue to deny the Pandemic. The people who claim that COVID is not “really dangerous” will continue to do so. The people who have supported and complied with masking, distancing, and being vaccinated, will continue to do so.
People have difficulty changing their mind, and facts and data rarely have any effect on that. And the smarter a person is, the more difficult it is to change their mind using facts and data.
Moreover, if people do not trust the government or the CDC, why should they trust the data that the government or the CDC release?
The government does need to build trust, but the way to do that is to actively help people, not provide piles of data which are only as trustworthy as the people who are releasing them.
Having 100 terabytes of raw data on the CDC’s website for anybody to download is not what will engender trust in the government in the populations that mistrust the government the most.
People need to be heard, and they do need information. But, as I wrote, information is not data.
Of course, now that “release the data!!” has become a thing, it has become important. I still do not think that releasing the data, in and of itself, is all that important, but it has now become a mantra and a slogan.
Ummm, that is not “releasing the data to the public”, that is “sharing the data with state and local health officials”.
So please do not take what I say out of context.
Dude, are you claiming that “not releasing the data” is the same thing as “not using data for decision making”?
Sheesh.
Also, “Data” is a series of codes and numbers. There are very very few people can make heads or tails of the “data”.
“Data” is not the same thing as “information”.
Which brings us to (the bolding and italics are mine):
That is “information”. And, all together now, “data is not the same thing as information”.
Not releasing the data (information) does make it more difficult for other entities to make informed decisions.
“Much of the withheld information could help state and local health officials better target their efforts to bring the virus under control. Detailed, timely data on hospitalizations by age and race would help health officials identify and help the populations at highest risk. Information on hospitalizations and death by age and vaccination status would have helped inform whether healthy adults needed booster shots. And wastewater surveillance across the nation would spot outbreaks and emerging variants early.”
I don’t disagree, but this common sense point refutes most of your position.
Let the states and local governments have at the data. Let the quant jocks at major health universities have at the data. There are literally thousands of PhD students and post-docs who could really crank on this stuff and feed information back to the CDC and public. Let the American Academy of Pediatrics have at the data. (my cynicism on this latter one is huge – prove me wrong.)
I feel like your argument aligns greatly to what countries like China do with controlling what citizens see and don’t see, but instead of blaming an authoritarian regime’s ultimate whims, our Public Health apparatus can hide behind some form of incompetence, lack of resources, or worry around how the data is interpreted which should be PUBLIC knowledge. I spend my days evaluating large amounts of business data (not the same as Covid data of course) , but I will take you up on your bet, because I already know I will follow where the data takes me, because I do it every single day.
A quote attributed to Mark Twain, though it probably didn’t originate with him, was there are three kind of lies: lies, dam…d lies and statistics. Gathering the data for Covid has been at best a difficult process. Collect the number of positive cases? How was a case considered positive, how many people were positive but never got tested, how many false positives and negatives were there etc. and that’s just one set of data points that we have from Covid. From there it gets interpreted. A lot of bias goes into ones interpretation and as uninformed and uneducated as I am about the subject I too have information bias. I read this section mostly because I think it’s interesting to see what others opinions about Covid, masks, vaccinations, etc. are. Should all of the data be released, maybe, but I don’t think it will change anything. It certainly won’t make things clearer.
I believe that you will, but you are the rarity. The vast majority of people decide where they want to be, and then follow the data until it takes them there.
Moreover, people come to you for the information, not the data. People pay you to provide that information, because the data is meaningless to them. I don’t think that you would be able to do your job very efficiently if all of your clients demanded to see all of the data that you have, and then came back to you and second guessed everything that you did because somebody on the internet told them that “the data proves” that you are cheating them.
Do you think that providing the raw data to your clients would make your job easier, and would it benefit them? Does your company make that data available?
Again, there is a vast difference between “not important” and “don’t do it”.
To bring back my older metaphor of the Blitz. While it was going on, how important was it that the citizens get the raw data on where bombs were falling, how much tonnage, how many airplanes, how many waves, etc? Imagine that, instead of fast analysis and setting off alarms, they would have had their people spending time processing this data, so that people could read it in the paper the next day.
I mean, how does this sound “I need this data so that I can decide whether I will go down to the shelters when the German airplanes start flying overhead”?
Letting people know what’s happening and the best ways to protect themselves - important
Data dump - not important, not while the CDC is struggling to develop ways to mitigate the crisis.
As an aside, when we talk about a totalitarian regime, we’re not talking about “whims”. We are talking about policies that are well thought out and planned. Well, about as well though out as anything done by a committee. North Korea is run according to the whims of a spoiled, narcissistic sociopath. China is run according to what a group of bureaucrats with a very specific set of beliefs think will result in the greater good for China as a country, and thus, in their view, the Chinese people. Of course their philosophy is influenced by the fact that they are xenophobic, racist, religiously intolerant, homophobic, misogynistic, paternalistic, and so enamored with their own feeling of superiority that they are unwilling to admit how much of their policies is based on making their own lives better at the expense of others.
I will also comment that, as math and science education continues to deteriorate in the country, people increasingly demand to see data that they understand less and less. Access to the data results in an illusion of control, rather than to the ability to make informed decisions. As I wrote, “feelings”.
To circle back - when you buy a car, you look at MPG, emissions, etc. These are not data, they are the results of the analysis that the car company performed. You are not asking for the hundreds of thousands of data points that are collected by the car companies.
Yes, often this information is not reliable. However, they are not reliable because the data that was provided was not reliable. Which brings me back to the major point - if you do not trust the government to analyze the data, why would you trust the government to collect and provide that data?
I will ask another question. As the amounts of data that are being used in analyses increases exponentially, and as analysis moves from statistical to machine learning, that data becomes useless to anybody who does not have access to supercomputing centers.
My question is - how will that data help the public? I mean, are you demanding the data that is being used to forecast your weather?
BTW, information about the data collection and analysis methods are far more important in understanding the results than the data themselves.
Data need to be available to state and local authorities who are preparing the response. Data need to be available to the people whose job it is to make sure that it is that the data are good. Data should be available to professionals, like epidemiologists. who study this.
Data should be available, when it doesn’t bother the functioning of CDC, through FOIA process, for everybody else. Again, I do not believe that this is high priority. I don’t really think that it’s important that a banker in Iowa, a history professor in New England, or a steel worker in PA have easy access to that data as soon as it’s collected.
I actually agree with you that these are great resources that should be utilized by the CDC. This is another place that we should take a page from the UK during WWII. When they wanted to crack the Enigma code, they utilized all sorts of amature puzzle solvers. Rather than simply release that data, the CDC should indeed reach out to these people, and share the data with them
Let’s assume, for the moment, you are right and that releasing the data would not have changed the anti-vaxxers minds. Maybe even empowered their point of view.
You can now also assume that NOT releasing the data induces a number of those you consider smart and sophisticated enough to be entrusted with such info - to question the next CDC round of recommendations.
I for one, will adopt a more - wait and see/less inclined to be early adopter - approach. But maybe that in and of itself puts me into the group of those who can not be trusted with such info as has been withheld.
The value in any entity releasing data is their willingness shows they have nothing to hide. It is a credibility thing. Transparency matters. Whether people actually use the data or use it properly is not for an entity - especially a governmental entity- to control.
People grouse on CC all the time about the mystery of holistic admissions and the unwillingness of colleges to release their data. People want more than “information” from them. People attribute all sorts of motivations to colleges in how they deal with admissions, and point to lack of data as proof of ulterior motives.
How is the critique of the CDC’s lack of transparency any different than the criticism of colleges’ lack of transparency? If anything, US citizens are more entitled to data - taxpayers funded it.
We have people in Maine who are troublemakers and abuse FOIA. They put in many, many requests with local school boards and town councils. It’s gotten out of hand here. They take pride in being tr0lls, really - one of them has even been on Fox News more than once.