Page 1 of 1 [ 1 post ] 

ASPartOfMe
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 25 Aug 2013
Age: 66
Gender: Male
Posts: 34,245
Location: Long Island, New York

05 Aug 2021, 10:08 am

More people have died of COVID-19 in NY than state publicly reports, fed data shows

Quote:
More than 2,000 additional people have died on Long Island from COVID-19 than New York State is publicly reporting, a Newsday analysis of federal and state data found.

The gap is rooted in New York’s continuing exclusion of some COVID-19 deaths from its publicly released totals, even though the state is aware of those additional deaths and reports them to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The New York State Department of Health says on its COVID-19 Tracker website that 7,297 people died on Long Island from COVID-19 as of Tuesday. But the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics reports a death toll of 9,405 through Wednesday — a number nearly 29% higher.

Statewide, the health department says 43,105 people have died of COVID-19 through Tuesday, but the CDC puts the number at 55,004 as of Saturday — a difference of nearly 28%.

The number displayed on the state website is based on daily electronic reports from hospitals, nursing homes and adult-care centers and used for "real-time monitoring and response planning," health department spokeswoman Erin Silk said in an email.

COVID-19-related deaths occurring outside those settings are not included. That would include deaths that occur in private homes, hospices and prisons.

The Center for Health Statistics totals come from death certificate data, said Robert Anderson, chief of the mortality statistics branch at the center. The New York State Health Department supplies data for all of the state outside New York City, and New York City's health department sends information on deaths within the five boroughs, he said. The state and city are contractually obligated to report all deaths to the CDC, he said

When asked about the gap in New York State numbers, Anderson said, "From the standpoint of what other states are doing, I guess it’s unusual."

Silk said the state publicly reports all COVID-19 deaths.

"To be clear, there's no such thing as 'federal data' as opposed to NYS data — the numbers disseminated by the CDC come from NYS' own daily reporting — it's all NYS data and it's all public," Silk said in an email.

Denis Nash, a professor of epidemiology at the CUNY School of Public Health in Manhattan, said he is perplexed by the omission of so many deaths from the state website.

"I have not really understood why the state has chosen to deviate from what the norms and standards are, except I should point out, they have politicized, it appears, epidemiological information in the past," Nash said, referring to how the state’s initial public counts of nursing home deaths were incomplete. "So one has to think the motivation for choosing to report numbers in a certain way that do not really show the true toll of the pandemic here in New York — the reasons behind that could be politically motivated as well."

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and state health officials repeatedly have denied they were trying to mislead the public in their counts of nursing home deaths. State and federal investigations are looking into whether the Cuomo administration deliberately tried to downplay nursing home deaths.

The CDC calls the death certificate numbers "provisional," because they are continually revised as more information is received and processed.

Anderson said death certificates are the most reliable way to determine the cause of death because they’re legal documents often filled out by doctors who know the patient’s medical history, or by a trained medical examiner.

Other states’ numbers also differ from the CDC’s count. But Newsday compared CDC data with totals from the 10 most populous states other than New York and found that New York had by far the largest gap between the numbers it publicly reports and the CDC’s.

Six of the 10 states had numbers higher than the CDC’s. That is in part because it can take weeks from the time of death for death certificates to be completed and then transmitted from states to the CDC, and for the CDC to compile the data, Anderson said. That means the 55,004 number for New York State is an underestimate, because it is missing some recent deaths, he said.

In addition, states may be using data other than, or in addition to, death certificates for the numbers in official state counts, he said.

The state Health Department’s death total for the five boroughs is more than 10,000 deaths below the city’s number.

New York City and New Jersey — and other states — call deaths without a positive PCR result "probable," rather than "confirmed," COVID-19 deaths.

New York "is somewhat of an outlier in not counting probable deaths," said Jennifer Nuzzo, an associate professor of epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University and the epidemiology lead for its coronavirus center.

In the early months of the pandemic, it was often difficult to obtain tests, so focusing only on "confirmed" deaths leads to "underestimates of the true number of COVID deaths," said Rebecca Betensky, chair of the biostatistics department at the New York University School of Global Public Health. The "probable" counts could be "slight overestimates," she said, because a small number of people who tested positive for COVID-19 could have died of other causes within 30 or 60 days of their test result.

We often get told that COVID is intentional hyperbole due to manipulating numbers to make them seem worse then reality. In New York we have the opposite problem.

IMHO Cuomo again.


_________________
Professionally Identified and joined WP August 26, 2013
DSM 5: Autism Spectrum Disorder, DSM IV: Aspergers Moderate Severity

“My autism is not a superpower. It also isn’t some kind of god-forsaken, endless fountain of suffering inflicted on my family. It’s just part of who I am as a person”. - Sara Luterman