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Comment by makomk | Hacker News Reader

I think I've got a good guess what data she didn't want removed or changed, and it's not exactly good for her case. On May the 5th, they day she was removed from her position, there was an all-time high spike of 113 reported coronavirus deaths due to Florida reporting a bunch of old deaths all at once: https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/2020/05/15/florida-adds...

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.

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I think that using date-of-report is better for lay-people. Pro/cons:

- 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.

An argument can be made that consistency is more important in these things than revision. If you've always charted the numbers based on the date the death is reported, then to try and change it would necessitate a lot of additional complexity in how the data is used.

> if I remember rightly some people did spin it as deaths increasing due to the lockdown being lifted.

People claimed that deaths on the day the lockdown ended were caused by the lockdown ending?

Sounds like they're trying to limit the release of real information so that the lying crazy media doesn't go crazy

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