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Comment by natrik | Hacker News Reader

From a reddit comment:

>An epidemiologist, Dr. Carina Blackmore, was the one who contacted the IT director to make the change. Then the IT director contacted Rebekah Jones to actually implement the change and she threw a fit. There is nothing to suggest Dr. Blackmore is political or wanted to support reopening.

>https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/2020/05/19/florida-heal...

>What Dr. Blackmore asked to be removed was a count of unconfirmed cases based on self-reported symptoms. They only wanted confirmed cases represented.

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Who is making the claim that she 'threw a fit'? The redditor? That's patronizing, not something that helps me understand the nature of the disagreement, and not something that makes me think any attempt is being made at a charitable attempt to understand her actions.

Charity goes both ways. Jones hasn’t reported more details than this, so to attack reports that don’t align with hers based on inaccurate language while supporting her complete lack of details seems dishonest. And come on, we both know what a developer throwing a fit means.

>And come on, we both know what a developer throwing a fit means.

No, I really don't. Tell me. Did she yell? Knock over a computer? What did she do? And then tell me which line of which news article supports that as a fair and charitable characterization. I don't know where that is coming from other than a commenter just asserting it. Meanwhile, as far as you are concerned, as long as you can close your eyes and picture what the fictional description of 'throwing a fit' looks like, that, rather than factual accuracy, is enough for you to accept the description.

And I don't see how 'charity goes both ways' has anything to do with anything, insofar as it's relevant to the characterization of Jones. It's not an answer or justification, it's a smoking crater of nothingness. Do you have anything else?

Could you include a link to the comment? I was not able to find your quoted text with Google nor Reddit's search engine.

I, and I imagine many others, immediately jumped to the conclusion that the data in question was more concrete, like confirmed cases or ICU counts. It goes to show how easily twists can be put on any story to serve a larger purpose

the data in question was more concrete, like confirmed cases or ICU counts

There's been been accusations of government manipulation of perceived infection rates through under testing. More concrete data is arguably only an improvement if sufficient testing is being conducted.

I think the goal should be the most concrete data we have. A debate could be had on if self reporting or test data is more accurate. One factor to consider is if the self reporting data is being represented in a way commonly reserved for test data. Another factor to consider is that 33% of Americans think they may have had covid and 13% think they probably did [1]. This is grossly out of agreement with serology results.

https://www.businessinsider.com/small-percentage-americans-w...

In this case, the media was using the self reporting data to claim that Florida had Covid-19 cases as early as December (and it's this that Florida was supposedly firing her for refusing to cover up): https://www.miamiherald.com/news/state/florida/article242480... Needless to say, people self-reporting Covid-19 symptoms that early is the most unreliable self-reporting data of all due to the low or maybe even zero number of genuine cases and the much larger prevalence of things like the flu. If I remember rightly, researchers have tried serology tests on people who thought they had it that early and found that basically none of them had.

But under testing has had the opposite effect of what you seem to be applying; it doesn't make the disease perceived as less dangerous, it makes the disease look much more severe by undercounting the mild cases.

Undertesting might make the severe cases look more dangerous, but the media focus right now is "flattening the curve". By under-reporting the number of active cases, politicians can push for earlier reopening.

The risk is that untested asymptomatic or presymptomatic cases can then exponentially spread back through the community.

I do wholeheartedly agree with a sibling comment that self-reported data should be clearly separated from actual confirmed cases.

Well that's pretty damning. Seems like the firing was more than warranted.

> Well that's pretty damning.

What did see do wrong, except wanting to keep the "truth" on the dashboard?

Please don't quote ops quotes for me, could also not find the comments or quotes in the article or /r/...

Wanting to portray possible cases as confirmed cases...

From the article posted above:

> she objected to the removal of records showing people had symptoms or positive tests before the cases were announced

I don't see your quote in this article. Is there a different article you are referring to?

It's in the first paragraph of this article: https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/2020/05/19/florida-heal...

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