Oxford-Based Group Stops Using @WHO Data for Coronavirus Reporting, Citing Errors @DrTedros fee.org/articles/oxfor… via @feeonline
Our World in Data, an online publication based at the University of Oxford, announced on Tuesday that it had stopped relying on World Health Organization (WHO) data for its models, citing errors and other factors.
The group’s founder, Max Roser, said researchers are now using data from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.
“Until March 18 we relied on the World Health Organization (WHO) as our source. We aimed to rely on the WHO as they are the international agency with the mandate to provide official estimates on the pandemic.
The WHO reports this data for each single day and they can be found here at the WHO’s site.
Since March 18 it became unfortunately impossible to rely on the WHO data to understand how the pandemic is developing over time.
Since March 18 it became unfortunately impossible to rely on the WHO data to understand how the pandemic is developing over time.
With Situation Report 58 the WHO shifted the reporting cutoff time from 0900 CET to 0000 CET. This means that comparability is compromised because there is an overlap between these two WHO data publications (Situation Reports 57 and 58).
Additionally we found many errors in the data published by the WHO when we went through all the daily Situation Reports. We immediately notified the WHO and are in close contact with the WHO’s team to correct the errors that we pointed out to them.”
WHO, an agency of the United Nations, is responsible for international public health. Recent reports suggest US intelligence agencies relied heavily on WHO in its national assessment of the COVID-19 threat.
The errors and inconsistencies include discrepancies from nearly a dozen situation reports filed by WHO between February 5 and March 16. Our World in Data researchers said the way WHO was handling the errors was also a problem.
“The main problem we see with the WHO data is that these errors are not communicated by the WHO itself,” Rosen and his colleagues state. “
“[S]ome Errata were published by the WHO—in the same place as the Situation Reports—but most errors were either retrospectively corrected without public notice or remain uncorrected.”
