Woman who designed Florida's Covid-19 dashboard removed from her position
cbs12.com
cbs12.com
Wow. I don't even know what to say. This is horrible, and misinformation at its worst. I feel like this is the magic marker on the hurricane map that nobody can easily laugh at, because they can't see it.
1) She will not be subject to long term repercussions for being honest and doing her job
2) Whoever asked her to cook the numbers, will be sued and arrested and go to jail. Cooking the numbers in this case equates to me as killing people, because decisions related to reopening, etc, will be heavily influenced by these numbers.
3) I hope that someone Rebekah Jones will know that unknown people in the internet, even in this obscure hacker site called Hacker News, are proud of what she stood for. She has nothing to gain and everything to lose, and yet she chose the right path. (again, assuming this is true)
Edit: people of Florida were lucky to have such a civil servant.
It doesn't appear to say she was fired. Just taken off this particular task.
I don't say this to excuse the problems. I just want to point out (based on my experience with family in some of these places and local news sources there) that the countries that are not ranked as highly tend to have a lot of problems that people who focus on US news genuinely don't often hear about and know about.
Certainly the United States does some morally dubious things that are comparable to some of the atrocities that e.g. China and Russia do, but I've still had the impression that oversight, transparency and freedom of speech _improve_ things.
"Oversight, transparency and freedom of speech" certainly improve things - to the extent they exist in a country - but they don't stop greedy people from lying and scheming. I'd say the same feature that makes democracy a nice system - bloodless change of power - also creates a framework for greedy people to scheme essentially risk-free. You can defraud the state and defraud the voters and retire rich, instead of getting shot by the opposing group for making too many waves. Point being, you shouldn't expect a country to not have these problems by the very virtue of being "a democracy" - and not China/Russia/Turkey/North Korea/whatnot.
Here's a paper i found: https://www.e-ir.info/2015/12/20/a-critical-analysis-of-the-...
There seems to be a correlation in some cases.
People choose well or bad, but People Choose (sorry for the caps). In NK, China, Russia people don't actually choose.
In USA people 'choose less' (check out "Gerrymandering", also check on YT: last week tonight Gerrymandering).
Moreover, consider the fact that the press is reporting the issue. And that we are freely discussing it.
She did the decent thing. They did force her to quit.
consider there is a "press like apparatus" working very hard to polarise the issue into dead lock. "teams" were already drawn up before the issue even started.
See David Moore's book The Opinion Makers: An Insider Exposes the Truth Behind the Polls.
How do we realize that ideal?
like in person? or on TV?
and from this you draw the conclusion that "tons" of deaths are misreported?
Ok sure a government supervisor isn’t literally dictating what the assembly line produces and how many.
But this story is just one of dozens a day that are all about managing information, acting as a forcing function, to get back to business as usual.
Pay no mind the body political and it’s monopoly on violence!
“Simply generate wealth! Nevermind as we hand out trillions for free! You have to BUY IN! Not these guys, they can get hand outs and tax breaks! Buy in!”
Which is it? Socialism or capitalism?
Believing there’s ever been anything but a managed effort is nonsense. There is no magic or gods. It’s people validating their identity and having it go unchallenged.
Inflation is deflation for the masses. The rich get more handouts when their assets droop.
Peter Thiel recently wrote about how in the history of man there’s always been elites managing the plebs. It’s how it works!
They’re managing what we believe is correct. It’s a biologically simple trick that’s been used intuitively with great success since the first tribal kings.
Here’s the modern version: we control what raw data you see so we can equivocate. It limits real choices and experiences. And it happens constantly while the masses look away at their repetitive jobs.
Hey all –
I’ve gotten a lot of emails from everyone during the last eight days ever since the dashboard went down, the data was hidden, and the functionality essentially crashed, so to clear up the confusion, I’m sending this final notice to the group.
For reasons beyond my division’s control, as of late in the day on May 5, my office (the DOH-GIS office) is no longer managing the COVID-19 Dashboard. I am no longer involved in the publication of data, fixing errors, answering questions, etc., in any shape or form. I helped them get it back running a few times but I have no knowledge about their plans, what data they are now restricting, what data will be added and when, or any of that. I understand, appreciate, and even share your concern about all the dramatic changes that have occurred and those that are yet to come. However, I cannot provide any insight now or going forward.
As a word of caution, I would not expect the new team to continue the same level of accessibility and transparency that I made central to the process during the first two months. After all, my commitment to both is largely (arguably entirely) the reason I am no longer managing it.
They are making a lot of changes. I would advise being diligent in your respective uses of this data. I know many of you have broken API links and map layers. I’ve listed the contacts for getting that information below.
The primary contacts going forward are listed below.
Anything related to EPI: REDACTED or REDACTED
Anything related to the technical aspects of the dashboard: REDACTED
It was great working with you guys. Good luck, and stay safe.
-30-
Rebekah Jones, GISP
GIS Manager| Division of Disease Control and Health Protection
PHONE # & EMAIL REDACTED
This is not a whistleblower complaint. It’s only evidence of bad faith on the part of the governor if you come in assuming bad faith to begin with.
>Rebekah Jones said in an email to CBS12 News that her removal was "not voluntary" and that she was removed from her position because she was ordered to censor some data, but refused to "manually change data to drum up support for the plan to reopen."
But now that you know what she's said to the news reporters, you can see that the context of this email is trying to inform people that the data isn't trustworthy without directly accusing anyone of wrongdoing that may lead to her being fired.
The good faith assumptions are:
* She was removed for reasons unrelated to manipulating data.
* She was not asked to manipulate data.
* No data will be manipulated.
Surely the people in charge of removing her and identifying her replacement can verify those assumptions?
This did not represent an actual spike in deaths which had in reality been declining, but if I remember rightly some people did spin it as deaths increasing due to the lockdown being lifted. Deaths by date reported are conspicuously missing from the current version of the dashboard; it only has dates by date of death, which is far less favourable to the claim that lifting the lockdown is causing an increase in deaths.
- There's a one time spike when the methodology changes
= The data lags reality on the ground (true for both date-of-report and date-of-death)
+ Past dates aren't updated, so there isn't a continuous bias to show a slowdown in the number of new deaths
I think that the last point is the most important because it's super easy for people to misinterpret provisional data. People were talking about covid-19 not causing excess mortality because using date-of-death always shows a dip for the present: https://twitter.com/TylerMorganMe/status/1248452375162925057
You can also see the same thing in the top comment on this Euromomo thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22866238
> Another very surprising thing is to see no excess mortality in Sweden, a country criticized for a laxer strategy against COVID-19. I was not expecting to see that.
That was week 14 for https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ . In fact, week 14's excess death z-score for Sweden was in the "very high excess" category after the data was collected.
People claimed that deaths on the day the lockdown ended were caused by the lockdown ending?
Local news is incredibly important. For instance, the Miami Herald's investigations uncovered the Epstein scandal: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/article220097825.html
how many of us would look the other way and make some excuse about how it’s not our call and we are just doing our jobs?
i hope that if our time ever comes, we would all have the courage to stand up for the truth like she did.
However, many people don't have such a luxury, especially outside the tech community.
Even in this case, I would be surprised if it turns out to be as blatant and obvious as it seems to be right now based on this report.
Communication is always political, and how information is represented is important, and public opinion matters.
For example in Quebec, there are 'big numbers' of cases, but almost 80% of the deaths are in long-term-care homes.
So you could have one person who doesn't want that data to be highlighted, while some other person does because frankly, that information might frame Covid as ultimately being less risky and yet, it's more transparent.
Hydroxychloroquine is another kind of example - in reality, there may be some benefit for this, but it's really not helpful to have the general public tweeting about it, because it's not generally useful, and the impact will be overwhelming on health officials and cause shortages for those non-covid people who really need it. So the information is either suppressed or 'led' in the direction that public health and safety officials want.
So if the state official was literally trying to get someone to literally just change the data and make it look better, this is obviously going to be a whistleblower case. But this may not be the situation.
Public communication is hard. Trump is probably the anti-example.
Everything is marketing, and I would certainly say it's plausible that a developer that was this much in the spotlight would be steering the conversation to at least frame him or herself in a positive light if not outright promote their politics (even if that is just one of transparency/government accountability).
I think the HNer thing to do is 'believe whistleblowers no matter what' but I'm of the inclination everyone is tricky and that we are deluded by our own egos quite a lot.
We need more context.
(In fact, I think Florida was actually the state where people took a all-time high spike in newly-reported coronavirus deaths due to the state reporting a bunch of old deaths at once as proof reopening was killing people. And that spike happened on the same day - May the 5th - as this woman complained that she was supposedly removed for "manually change data to drum up support for the plan to reopen.")
We'll take your word for it. I assume you have ascertained that what your sources are claiming is correct and that the data displayed previously was also correct?
I can think of many other possibilities and prefer to wait for an official investigation before yelling for someone's head.
That's a far-fetched hypothesis, bordering on conspiratorial thinking.
A more mundane, realistic -and more common- scenario: due to mistakes made (as noted in OP: downtime, misplaced data files, APIs needlessly changed, etc.,) the responsibility was transferred to another team.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/comments/gmfkoa/woman_w...
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article24285125...
> “Rebekah Jones exhibited a repeated course of insubordination during her time with the department, including her unilateral decisions to modify the department’s COVID-19 dashboard without input or approval from the epidemiological team or her supervisors,” Ferré said. “The blatant disrespect for the professionals who were working around the clock to provide the important information for the COVID-19 website was harmful to the team. Accuracy and transparency are always indispensable, especially during an unprecedented public health emergency such as COVID-19. Having someone disruptive cannot be tolerated during this public pandemic, which led the department to determine that it was best to terminate her employment.”
So, depending on what you choose to believe at this point, you could also consider the possibility that she was making modifications to inflate the numbers and exaggerate the problem.
There are too many in power invested too heavily in the status quo to allow end participants in the labor market to have enough data to make their own risk assessments. This is why states that have reopened despite it being unsafe to do so have set up unemployment snitch lines for people who don't want to risk their lives, so that the threat of eviction or starvation can be used against them.
I worry we are going to see a lot of naked greed come forth in the next few months, and thousands of preventable deaths as a result.
Much harder to fix the ONS excess death stats, and those are now running at around 55,000.
Over here in Poland, I've heard enough rumors in April that obviously-COVID-19-related deaths aren't counted as COVID-19 deaths because of a technicality, so I'm not giving much confidence to our official stats either. But it's harder to cook overall deaths.
In other words, garbage in, garbage out. "Lalalala I can't hear you, you can't see me, we aren't dying" is an objectively stupid strategy. And it's leading to objectively bad results. Let me just say it bluntly. This is stupid. Please can we use that word again? Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
Infuriating.
I'm assuming the plan is that when we inevitably get hit by a second wave they can just blame the businesses or the counties for not doing a good enough job or something. Considering how much of a joke the reopening guidelines have been and how little the state is willing to enforce them.
It’s kind of middle of nowhere FL with a low population density.
Everyone is retired and the closest major airports are Tampa and Orlando (I think) and I suspect visitors/tourism to The Villages are relatively low in number.
Additionally, from what I last saw around 50% of confirmed cases were in South FL. Where there are major international airports, plentiful tourism, and greater population density.
At any rate, this is why I argue each local community should deal with situation as it evolves. You can't pretend the virus is hitting everywhere equally at once and it makes no sense to shut businesses down when your local hospital is at less than 50% capacity.
Cherry on top: everything is hyperpartisan, which leads to the destruction of public trust. In some alternate reality, Mr. Trump and Ms. Pelosi would hold a joint press conference and tell us the cold facts: There are NO good options. Many people are going to die, and there is nothing anyone can do to indefinitely prevent that. Let's at least hold our heads up with dignity.
I mean, I am really trying hard to not be overly cynical, but I'm so thoroughly disappointed with everyone's reaction to COVID-19 - from the well-known failures of the US Federal Government, all the way to my little part of the planet and the Poland's mistreatment of healthcare (of which I've heard plenty from inside the healthcare system) and attempts to have elections this month anyway (ended up postponed at the last minute)... At this point I'm assuming all reported statistics everywhere are +/- 2 orders of magnitude, and I'll be keeping every protective measure I can until it's unambiguous that my region has dealt with the virus successfully, or until I'm forced to stop keeping those measures by fiat.
1. Hide for an indefinite amount of time, devastating the economy.
2. Re-open, get hit by a second wave, also devastating the economy. (Economies don't do great in the middle of an uncontrolled pandemic.)
3. Do the hard work of getting public health efforts, employment law, and testing logistics to the point where you can re-open safely.
Guess which option we're going with?
States are citing employers who are compelling sick people to come to work, or banning employees from wearing masks? Which states?
States are hiring armies of contact tracers? States are rolling out massive, free, convenient testing before reopening?
The only thing states seem to be doing is trying their best to send people back to work, regardless of whether or not their workplaces are safe, and lifting restrictions, regardless of whether or not they are ready. (Why, for instance, are the states re-opening businesses simultaneously limiting bans on large gatherings? Large gatherings are not necessary for re-opening the economy.)
Do you think all those 20-something Florida Spring Breakers and NYC bar/beach-goers are big Trump followers?
I live in a beach town in CA. We have had only minor issues enforcing the distancing rules. Despite what you may have read in the media, the vast majority of the population supports the measures and are complying with the orders. But the few issues that we have had got a ton of news coverage. So there is a bit of a selection bias there.
https://www.insider.com/florida-authorities-release-video-bl...
In your estimation, what percentage of the 3k young people at this block party take their queues from Trump or Fox News? I have a hard time imagining even a single one of them has watched any news in the last week, much less right wing news.
But the handful of sparsely attended, astro-turfed lockdown protests, which were spun in the news as a ground swell of anti-lockdown support, were absolutely influenced (if not actively coordinated) by the right wing media and Trump.
And for the record, your original claim was that states are loosing control, so that is forcing them to open back up. And my claim, was that that is incorrect, they are making a political calculation. The governors are getting squeezed from the right by Trump-ism, and they are getting squeezed from within by their rapidly expanding budget deficits. And at this point, a second wave is unavoidable due to the poor responses around the globe and within the US, so the benefits of successfully eliminating the virus in any particular state have been greatly diminished. But at any point, if a state deemed it necessary, they could marshal the resources to enforce stay-at-home orders. There is no populist uprising threatening their illusion of control, as you seem to believe.
This is not a partisan phenomenon. The few hundred people agitating at rallies are irrelevant. People are going about their business, violating the law and guidelines all over the place. No one is going to arrest all those people in the Ozarks. The states are in a position where they can either try to arrest the thousands upon thousands of people like the ones in that video, or they can scramble to try to make the law reflect reality on the streets. They are choosing the latter.
So how common is this?
Side note - someone please hire Ms. Jones.
https://cbs12.com/news/local/covid-19-dashboard-designer-fac...
I'm not American and all I know about the US media landscape is what I get from HN, but isn't Sinclair this local broadcaster that's notorious for spreading absolute bollocks all the time?
Does this site have anything to do with the real CBS?
More specifically, is any of this true?
Note that floridatoday.com is a Gannett/GateHouse paper, and the reason why I didn’t submit it is because I had thought that network is inaccesible to EU users.
I believe it is better in general to post the original source, in order to support local journalism.
When an American TV station is 'ABC 7' or 'CBS 12' that typically means they're a local TV station with a deal to rebroadcast official ABC, CBS, etc programming mixed in with some bits of local/original footage. So when you watched an ABC station here, you got mostly national ABC footage combined with a mix of local content (like news programs) and local ads.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZggCipbiHwE&disable_polymer=...
We are the Borg. Resistance is futile.
It only furthers the populace's depth of under- and mis-education about anything that may be of relevance to the state of the country / world. It will only serve to pour fuel on conspiracy theories and fake news that are already burning out of control.
Transparency is a requirement of democracy. Australia has been increasingly legislating against whistleblowers and real (no-real-Scotsman arguments aside) journalism for a few years now. The world was already heading this way, and it only seems to be gaining momentum, and this time the "free, democratic West" are right there along for the ride instead of conscripting their populace against the threat.
We will beat China at their own game! (and in doing so lose ourselves entirely).
(Yes, this is a big dramatic post over a small thing, but it feels like the timing of this small thing is as a result of the looming big thing: the US Presidential elections).
Obviously the US is different from China. In China, this women would be dead and no one would know her name, or she wouldn't have spoken up in the first place because of that risk. In the US, she proudly spoke out without fear of government repercussion, and the commenters on this website proudly support her also without fear of repercussion.
All we know is that someone was removed for what they perceived be 'censoring some data' - and we really have almost no context or material facts.
It continues to amaze me how people jump to conclusions and can't fathom how power, information, and communications work within any organization and that it's always complicated.
Having responsibility is almost 100% 'making sausage' and there is literally no situation in which the public will have access to 100% of the information, and when they do, it will be communicated in a specific way, hopefully for the public good.
For example, someone could feel that it's 'really important' to publish the latest finding on Hyrcoxychloroquine, or Remdesevir or whatever, when from a public communications perspective, it may not be helpful at all to be a focus on this information. Some might call this censorship, some might call it suppression, others might call it responsible.
How about hospital vacancy rates? Because all over North America, the vast majority of Hospitals are sitting idle, and medical staff are being laid off. Funny we don't see that on CNN. Obviously, from a public health policy, maybe this wouldn't be such a good set of data to focus on because people might get the impression that there is materially no pandemic, unable to grasp that in fact, the low rates of hospitalization are due to social distancing measures.
My gosh man this is everyday life in so many fields.
If some Florida politician was trying to literally get numbers manipulated, hopefully, this will be dealt with in the criminal justice system, but this may not be the case.
COVID is a sausage-making communications nightmare for everyone involved, there are massive legal issues, massive economic consequences, existential life and death concerns, literally geopolitical realignment happening in real-time.
Let's try to get more information.
Edit - a relevant example from Miami Herald: [1] "But since the state’s first confirmed coronavirus case, officials have kept some basic information confidential. Most notable: DeSantis has chosen not to reveal the names of nursing homes experiencing outbreaks — cases that, according to Florida Department of Health data, have resulted in at least 126 deaths."
This is exactly the same in Quebec - they don't want to release the individual names of the homes (they are of course known to the occupants and relatives) because it's not meaningful information for the public to have. They've made a reasonable case for not doxxing the homes with problems.
So this is a pretty good example of where public information is managed for the public good. It happens everywhere.
What troubles me specifically about the whistleblower complaint is that there were no specifics at all - no actual articulation of malfeasance. 'Censorship' is a pretty vague term.
[1] https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article24205069...
The irony of this part.
We need to hold leaders accountable, and we need to make good decisions. They are actively undermining that ability by censoring data and trying to cover their asses.
The rest of your comment trots out a truckload of red herrings about information we might not want to look at right now, or some disgruntled or misguided person not following proper channels and rushing to get out crap information about drugs or something. These things could not be less related to what we are talking about here. FFS they fired the person whose official job it was to make information available to the public and she reports it was because they wanted to censor it. I mean, does that not strike you as something she should absolutely blow the whistle on?
I think you are misreading my point and definitely misunderstanding the nature of the person's job.
We don't know what happened and 'censored' can mean a lot of things.
My quotes are not 'red herrings' - they are examples of what is happening right now.
The Miami Herald is upset that Flordia would not publish the names of retirement homes?
What if this is literally the issue in question? What if this 'whistleblower' wanted to publish said names, but the Gov. didn't want her to? Is this worthy of whistle-blowing? I don't think so.
What if she wanted to make a graph where the landing page highlighted 'total new cases' (which looks bad because it's always rising) but the state wants 'daily new cases' (which looks better because it's ostensibly flat. Is that censorship?
And by the way - disgruntled people are fired all the time.
What we need is more information, and it's odd that the state employee did not actually give more specifics, it would validate the cause a little better.
Finally - it's not her job to decide what goes out and whatnot. Definitely not, that's a fairly high-level decision. Her job is to communicate and coordinate it effectively. But again, using my example the decision as to 'do we name the long term care homes or not?' is definitely above her pay grade. That's a communications job it will touch the highest levels.
So again - we need more information in order to determine the severity of what happened here. Maybe there is fraud rising to criminality, in which case I hope someone goes to jail, but it may not be that.
Whether it’s stuff like this, crapping on journalists for asking legit questions, concealing or even destroying climate data, etc these folks should not be trusted with anything of consequence under any circumstances.
The fish rots from the head— even presuming this was the handiwork of some political appointee/apparatchik/barnacle who wanted to make sure there is no “bad news”, they got their cue from higher up the food chain.
You’d figure a genuine crisis like this might shake these folks out of their stupor but no luck yet.
Many folks are stressed af about the economy & there needs to be be a cost/benefit way to measure the risks, etc but this is no good.
This is the kind of shady/moronic behavior you’d expect in a political ecosystem like China, Russia, Turkey, etc
A true democracy, first tell people not to vote only for their own interest, but the nation's, and whatever they vote for, it's THEIR responsibility. No buts, no ifs, you vote you pay. Fake news or corrupt oranges, the citizens have the last word: they wanted it.
This line is tired and ridiculous. If you can't see why people ranging from poor to upper class might favor right wing ideology, without resorting to tropes and strawman arguments, you're not trying. The same is true for left wing ideology.
It's not voting against their self interest, it's voting against YOUR PERCEPTION of their interest.
Two points:
-your covid-19 figures, if plausible, should be in line with 'excess-mortality', or you should have an explanation why they are not (keep in mind that some major sources of non-corona mortality were significantly lower during lockdown, while others were slightly up).
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/04/16/tracking...
- Ask one of the ICU nurses or doctors (I'm sure everyone at least knows a friend of a friend) what happens to those that 'survive' the covid-19 hospitalization? Why is it we are only hearing about 'deaths', as if everything is 'just super' if you weren't hoisted out in a bodybag?
Many others states don't test dead flu suspects at all, and thereby don't report as COVID-19. You only see the real numbers later with the excess mortality.
But recently (starting with April 24) even these numbers were cooked as they applied wrong models for the last two weeks. They were proven wrong when you compare the reports for subsequent weeks via archive.org.
Other known cheaters are Japan, Turkey, Russia, Germany. It's an interesting game and not many whistleblowers or good journalism.
I really don't know how we go back from this. Things like antivaxx were fringe movements mocked half a decade ago, but they've been gaining more and more momentum. Conspiracy theories are now the norm and even the absurd ones, like Flat Earth, have more and more believers.
Random conspiracy theories directing their ire at everything from Jewish people to 5g cell towers, not so much.
In the last few years I have been living in shock. I can't believe what is happening at the top levels of power. I oscillate between disbelief and anger. I spend most days with a sick feeling in my stomach. I constantly ask myself "How is this happening? When will someone stop the madness?", but it seems there is a story like this almost everyday.
I am close to losing hope.
All states are corrupted by their secrets. America is no exception.
What had changed is that Trump doesn't try to hide it, he doesn't care. And because of that, the media (which is where you get your info) also doesn't try to pretend not to be biased.
They hate Trump, he hates them, he makes up stuff about them, they only report the worst things they can find. (Try it, listen to a Trump press conference, then read the press about it.)
The cure? Stop listening to opinion and speech, and only watch actions.
That's their job, after all. \s
Sure, I'll wait.
In general I think this whole idealogical battle over reopening is really dumb. There isn't going to be either a significant economic recovery or a spike in cases, because only a tiny minority of people are going to actually behave the way they did before the shutdowns. Most people are still not going to engage in activities that really spread the virus significantly (densely pack restaurants, large indoor gatherings) and many, many people will wear masks.
Due to reopening? More likely due to noisy data. There was a similar spike of 50 new deaths reported on April 30th, before Texas reopened.
And after the 15th, the numbers reverted to the mean: 33 on the 16th, 31 on the 17th.
The next time Democrats pull these shenanigans, name and shame them. Both-sides-ism only obscures the bad actors that should be directly pressured to do better.
Here's what several news organizations have to say about Ron DeSantis (R-FL):
"Stop hiding true COVID-19 stats, Gov. DeSantis. Our lives are still at risk" — https://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/editorials/article242557...
"Florida avoided COVID-19 catastrophe by ignoring DeSantis, Trump" — https://www.sun-sentinel.com/opinion/commentary/fl-op-com-sc...
"[Florida] blocked medical examiners from making public their own fatality counts and released a list of those deaths last week only after redacting key information" — https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/does-florida-gov-ro...
Edit: the Cuomo section is an edit made after I posted this, as is the [0] addendum
A whistleblower sounding the alarm on data falsification is in no way comparable to a high-level rollup of data which, by the way, is (at most) a few clicks away on that same site.
It isn't. References to "data" are provided, no models or tabular data / metric-driven formulas are. I have a state information freedom request processing. Compare NY to WA and tell me if you really think the data is comparable.
As for the data falsification claim, I have no idea why Inslee makes his decisions or when the phases will start based on metrics/numbers. It's entirely up to him and his mandate. That's not falsification, but it sure ain't transparent government or any sort of support for small businesses suffering from extended shutdown orders with no insight on the process.
https://www.doh.wa.gov/Emergencies/NovelCoronavirusOutbreak2...
From this data, what algorithms/models does Inslee plug it into? What are acceptable levels of infection/community spread/ICU beds? Cuomo is very transparent about the 2nd question, which is enough for me given a two month window of time to work on it.
Um, what? You just linked to a random non-(data) dashboard page and decided that metrics aren’t published?
When I visit https://www.doh.wa.gov/, I see a banner that links to https://www.doh.wa.gov/Emergencies/Coronavirus, which in turn prominently links to the actual dashboard https://www.doh.wa.gov/Emergencies/NovelCoronavirusOutbreak2... The aforementioned page also has simple data summary tables https://www.doh.wa.gov/Emergencies/Coronavirus#CovidDataTabl... I can’t even find that random page you linked to without digging.
To be clear I’m very tired of partisan bullshit and has no dog in the fight, and there may be other valid criticisms, not to mention it’s not at all clear the published data is accurate (given earlier scandals around care homes), but this particular criticism is very misleading.
Again, to be clear, I’m personally on the caution side, not the reopening side.
If your point is about phases, maybe re-word your initial comment to make that clear.
Anyone who wants to read a downvoted comment, btw, can do so more easily by clicking on its timestamp. That should take you to a page where it's more readable—assuming of course that there is content left to read.
Reading the New York Times recently, I've been struck not only by the amount of sheer bile directed at Trump and Republicans (which I can understand), but a consistent thread of seemingly wanting to make the COVID crisis seem as bad as possible, casting even positive developments in the US in a negative light ("Cases are going down in city X... but how many are not being measured in city Y!?!"). In particular, the necessity of locking down everything forever (and, by extension, loosening lockdown being an unforgivable sin) is starting to take on religious tones, instead of being an extreme but temporary measure grounded in science. Which sounds uncomfortably like a mirror image of what Republicans and the right-wing press are doing ("freedom good, lockdown bad!").
You may have a number of conservative talking heads in the UK yelling for reopening, but in no other place I know of the virus is actually a partisan issue.
One of the reasons, in my book, why the US response is so terrible compared to just about every other rich country.
(No, this is not because I'm supporting Republicans. I'm supporting HN.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23231556.
They're counting cancer patients that were given 30 days to live as COVID if they were positive when they died.
https://video.foxnews.com/v/6157380317001/
CDC #'s (yes, yes 2 weeks old yawn) https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm
So the fact that the EU creates policies on other topics isn't relevant to the COVID-19 situation.
Now I realize that cookies and IP-addresses gathered by Facebook are truly important things, unlike this tiny "flu-like" virus, but still...
That the EU has the power to dictate policies in other areas is not relevant.
Anyway, this is irrelevant. EU was explicitly not meant to rule on healthcare-related matters for its member nations, so it's not ruling. That's a fact of the matter. Perhaps after all of this, people will vote to include healthcare into the EU's purview - and only then we'll be able to criticize its response to the next crisis.
I don't know what you think they are doing shady, but it never bothered me. Until some EU-asshole decided to protect me from myself, I guess.
When everybody is breaking the law maybe it is the law that is broken, eh?
GDPR is there to ensure those awesome services aren't also taking advantage of you, by requiring them to disclose when they want to do so, and to ask you to explicitly agree to be taken advantage of. Clarity in business relationships is good, isn't it?
> When everybody is breaking the law maybe it is the law that is broken, eh?
Not necessarily, not when it's broken for profit and to the detriment of the parties that doesn't partake in that profit. Going by your law of reasoning, slavery and child labour should've never been banned (after all, "everyone" in plantations/factories would be found breaking that law), and environmental protections should've never existed either ("what do you say I can no longer dump toxic waste into the river?").
You still haven’t explained how exactly I was taken advantage of. Because I never had anything to complain about. On the contrary, I was quite happy until EU started "helping" me.
> Going by your law of reasoning, slavery and child labour should've never been banned
Are you really comparing logging visitor IP addresses to slavery, child labor and toxic waste???
Every possible kind of data you radiate during your visit to such a site is collected and passed on to third parties that aggregate it to build a detailed profile of you, based on the information from sites you visit, services you use, games you play, places you shop, etc. That profile is nowadays primarily used to target you with advertising and direct marketing efforts - or, in other words, to suck money out of you, a little bit at a time. You're losing money because of this data collection - that's the primary reason for that collection in the first place - but it happens slowly and naturally, so you don't notice.
And then there's a good chance that such profile of you will eventually find its way to your insurance provider, healthcare provider, or that your government decides to take a step towards totalitarianism, and then they'll have everyone's digital twins available for the secret police for free. I agree that the last one is hypothetical, but not that hypothetical, all things considering.
> Are you really comparing logging visitor IP addresses to slavery, child labor and toxic waste???
No, I'm just showing the logical consequences of your "When everybody is breaking the law maybe it is the law that is broken, eh?" through examples that are a little bit more clear-cut.
Also, it's not "logging visitor IP" that causes the popup, it's "logging visitor IP, associating it with a bunch of UUIDs, and sending those UUIDs, along with whatever information the visitor's browser could gather and the server could give, to a bunch of third parties who also receive similar packets of information from other sites you visit". Also2, it's not "everybody", it's just businessmen. Normal people don't go around, record data about others without their knowledge or consent, and sell it to data brokers.
The countries within the EU all have responded to COVID-19 in some way or another.
There's a bunch more stuff.
With literal criminal prosecution for moving in a safe way 20 kilometers from your house in a car, or even being outside at all for longer than the prescribed short walk, 100 meters away from anyone, government-led propaganda discrediting legitimate medical research in Marseilles, largely state-affiliated media with ownership stakes in Gilead fuelling criticism at the same research (while family members of politicians receive the exact same treatment that's being vilified), PPE stocks shipped away to China in the early stages of the pandemic...
Lockdown orders delayed in the face of all evidence in order to complete local elections, with the chief of police attributing the resulting spike in deaths afterwards to people violating the quarantine that was not yet in place, a police force that only shortly before the epidemic was beating up and tear-gassing nurses that were protesting their working conditions, a government that, as in the HIV/AIDS epidemic, takes the opportunity to pass laws protecting them against persecution even if it turns out they were objectively responsible for bad things that happened...
The federal response in the US has been absolutely laughable, and there's plenty of stuff to criticise on a state level as well, but there's blood on the hands of the authorities in parts of Europe as well.
Edit: would you please stop posting flamebait and/or unsubstantive comments generally? You've unfortunately been doing that repeatedly, and we eventually ban such accounts. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.
We don’t believe Joe Biden’s accuser without more evidence, why do we believe this lady automatically?