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Fairfax Underground
Welcome to Fairfax Underground, a project site designed to improve communication among residents of Fairfax County, VA. Feel free to post anything Northern Virginia residents would find interesting.
Welcome to Fairfax Underground, a project site designed to improve communication among residents of Fairfax County, VA. Feel free to post anything Northern Virginia residents would find interesting.
How Virginia Juked Its COVID-19 Data
Posted by:
Ralph Northam must resign
()
Date: May 15, 2020 09:55AM
Article from The Atlantic, a traditionally progressive magazine.
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“It is terrible. It messes up everything,” Jha told us. He said that combining the test results, as Virginia has done, produces information that is impossible to interpret.
The state’s decision to combine the tests was first reported by the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
The two tests have little in common. Viral tests help officials do the basic blocking and tackling necessary to contain an outbreak. If someone tests positive on a viral test, they are still infectious, so they can be told to self-isolate in order to protect the susceptible population. Public-health workers can trace their contacts to find others who may be infected with the coronavirus but who are not yet experiencing symptoms. Viral tests can also be used to monitor people who work in high-risk environments—such as a meatpacking plant—to diagnose a contagious person before they spread the disease.
Antibody tests, on the other hand, allow for something closer to post-game analysis. They help officials understand the true number of people in a state or city who have been exposed to the coronavirus. But they do so on a lag: Individuals who test positive on an antibody test are likely no longer infectious, and were infected by the coronavirus at least a week earlier.
Read: Should you get an antibody test?
The two tests do not even examine the same specimens. Viral tests analyze a throat swab, nasal swab, or saliva sample. They are sometimes called “PCR” tests, after the polymerase-chain-reaction technique used to isolate viral genetic material. But antibody tests use a blood sample. They are sometimes called “serological” tests, because they analyze the blood serum.
In other words, combining positive and negative results from the two tests in the same statistic, as Virginia has done, makes no sense.
But commonwealth officials say they have no choice. Other states are mixing their results, claimed Clark Mercer, the chief of staff to Governor Ralph Northam, at a press conference this week.
“You can’t win” by keeping viral and antibody findings separate in public data, he said, adding that combining the two tests’ results was the only way to improve Virginia’s position in a list of states ranked by the number of tests they had conducted per capita. “If another state is including serological tests, and they’re ranked above Virginia, and we are not, and we’re getting criticized for that, [then], hey, you can’t win either way. Now we are including them, and our ranking will be better, and we’re being criticized,” he said.
We could not find evidence that other states are blending test results in the way that Mercer claimed. In an email, a spokesperson for the Virginia Department of Health claimed that Arizona, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia also mingled viral and antibody results. This is false: Those three governments either separate out, or do not report, the result of negative antibody tests to the public.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/05/covid-19-tests-combine-virginia/611620/
-----------------------------------------------------------
“It is terrible. It messes up everything,” Jha told us. He said that combining the test results, as Virginia has done, produces information that is impossible to interpret.
The state’s decision to combine the tests was first reported by the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
The two tests have little in common. Viral tests help officials do the basic blocking and tackling necessary to contain an outbreak. If someone tests positive on a viral test, they are still infectious, so they can be told to self-isolate in order to protect the susceptible population. Public-health workers can trace their contacts to find others who may be infected with the coronavirus but who are not yet experiencing symptoms. Viral tests can also be used to monitor people who work in high-risk environments—such as a meatpacking plant—to diagnose a contagious person before they spread the disease.
Antibody tests, on the other hand, allow for something closer to post-game analysis. They help officials understand the true number of people in a state or city who have been exposed to the coronavirus. But they do so on a lag: Individuals who test positive on an antibody test are likely no longer infectious, and were infected by the coronavirus at least a week earlier.
Read: Should you get an antibody test?
The two tests do not even examine the same specimens. Viral tests analyze a throat swab, nasal swab, or saliva sample. They are sometimes called “PCR” tests, after the polymerase-chain-reaction technique used to isolate viral genetic material. But antibody tests use a blood sample. They are sometimes called “serological” tests, because they analyze the blood serum.
In other words, combining positive and negative results from the two tests in the same statistic, as Virginia has done, makes no sense.
But commonwealth officials say they have no choice. Other states are mixing their results, claimed Clark Mercer, the chief of staff to Governor Ralph Northam, at a press conference this week.
“You can’t win” by keeping viral and antibody findings separate in public data, he said, adding that combining the two tests’ results was the only way to improve Virginia’s position in a list of states ranked by the number of tests they had conducted per capita. “If another state is including serological tests, and they’re ranked above Virginia, and we are not, and we’re getting criticized for that, [then], hey, you can’t win either way. Now we are including them, and our ranking will be better, and we’re being criticized,” he said.
We could not find evidence that other states are blending test results in the way that Mercer claimed. In an email, a spokesperson for the Virginia Department of Health claimed that Arizona, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia also mingled viral and antibody results. This is false: Those three governments either separate out, or do not report, the result of negative antibody tests to the public.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/05/covid-19-tests-combine-virginia/611620/
Re: How Virginia Juked Its COVID-19 Data
Posted by:
Herpderp
()
Date: May 15, 2020 10:01AM
So you saw the attached thread, clicked on the Atlantic link, and thought “I know, I’ll create a new thread with the exact same information, because I am a retard”. Good going, potato.
http://www.fairfaxunderground.com/forum/read/2/3361176.html
http://www.fairfaxunderground.com/forum/read/2/3361176.html