Fed. system to track hosp. beds and Covid-19 patients provides questionable data | Hacker News Reader

Fed. system to track hosp. beds and Covid-19 patients provides questionable data

sciencemag.org

29 pointsblendo6 comments

Another quality Palantir product, alongside their immigrant management product for ICE, their gang activity product for the LAPD, and their journalist-tracking product for the KSA.

Isn't it good that people who build things you oppose are incompetent? I would unironically celebrate that.

For example, I'm happy that the CIA/FBI are occasionally incompetent because it hurts their ability to meaningfully implement and reduces the worst impacts of mass surveillance.

No, because instead of worrying about the bad data, the powers that be will instead take the bad data as-is. No one cares about data quality, they only care that they have someone or something to point to when they make terrible policy decisions. THAT'S the problem.

Why do you think Trump wants to exclude illegal immigrants from the Census? The media will never footnote data because they are lazy or don't understand or they've given up.

The same goes for when GW Bush took the cost of the Iraq War out of the budget. Every media outlet just fell in line and reported the budget as-is, instead of saying "Oh by the way, the trillions of dollars spent on the Iraq War aren't part of this number."

If something is bad, and everyone knows it's bad, and it's thus ignored, that's fine.

If something is bad, but people believe it's a magical oracle, that's _very_ dangerous.

"As for the difference between state and HHS Protect data, an HHS official contends state numbers “are always going to be lower” by up to 20%. That’s because hospitals could lose Medicare funding if they do not report to HHS, the official says, but face no penalty for failing to report to the state. So rather than expect identical numbers, HHS looks for state and federal data to reflect the same trajectory—which they do in all cases for COVID-19 inpatient data, according to another confidential CDC analysis of HHS Protect, covering all 50 states.

"Yet the same analysis found 27 states recently alternated between showing more or fewer COVID-19 inpatients than HHS Protect—not always just fewer, as HHS says should be the case. Thirty states also showed differences between state and HHS Protect figures that were frequently well above the 20% threshold cited by HHS, and HHS Protect data fluctuated erratically in 21 states (see chart, below)."

Still waiting for the bestseller "How to Tell the Truth With Statistics" to hit.

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