Millions of People Missing From CDC Covid Data As States Fail To Report Cases, NPR
- NPR, Sept. 1, 2021.
Colorful maps on the new online Health Equity Tracker reveal how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected different races and age groups across the United States, but you can tell something is not quite right.
A handful of states are grayed out, and that's not because they've escaped the pandemic.
"There's no data coming out of Texas," points out software engineer Josh Zarrabi of Atlanta's Morehouse School of Medicine, which recently rolled out the tracking portal. "A lot of Americans should be unhappy about that. And they should say, like, 'Wow, like, we need the data, right, because we're missing a huge piece of the puzzle here.' " And it's not just a search for jigsaw pieces from Texas.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has tallied over 39 million cases of COVID-19 in the U.S., but if you want to know more detailed information, such as where patients live, whether patients were hospitalized or died, demographic details like race, gender and age, that information is gathered separately. In that more detailed CDC data set, about 1 in 5 known cases — or 7 million people — are completely missing, an NPR analysis found. On top of that, about two-thirds of the data present aren't usable, as health care providers marked fields as "Unknown" or simply left them blank.
Most states have voluntarily sent up whatever records they have, but a handful have not. Texas, Missouri, Louisiana, West Virginia and Wyoming have each submitted less than one-tenth of their total cases. Another handful of states, including Florida, Michigan and Kentucky, have smaller but still significant gaps in their data, each completely missing over 30% of their known cases. Over 3 million Texans have had COVID-19, but just 81,000 are in the data set. That's not even 3%...
More,
https://www.npr.org/2021/09/01/1032885251/millions-of-people-are-missing-from-cdc-covid-data-as-states-fail-to-report-case
= new reply since forum marked as read
