Gov. DeWine is moving us away from the Ohio Public Health Advisory system because it has gone almost entirely red now (and will, again, be completely without any purple again this week).
Below is Gov. DeWine's reasoning behind doing so - that he called this a 'early warning system' and that it 'told a good story.'
Also attached is Fort's presentations of the Map of Fear using the new rules. Those rules are - 'high incidence' maintaining red indefinitely, a 'watchlist' week for counties before turning purple, and counties remaining purple for two weeks before being allowed to return to red.
This next image is what the OPHAS would look like without the new rules.
Notice how the OPHAS with the new rules was not an early warning system - it delayed an already delayed system by an extra week, and held on to that alarm long after the window of highest danger had passed.
It now tells us nothing at all.
But yes, the OPHAS with the new rules did tell a nice scary 'story,' at least through the fall. It was not a true story though. If Gov. DeWine and ODH would be interested in telling the real story, and not just a story of perpetual fear -
- they would be celebrating the fact that only 21 counties should be red (not 84) and that TWO counties should actually be yellow (including Lucas County which is where Toledo is).
📢 There was a wave in November. One that did not overwhelm our hospitals. That wave has largely passed. It is past time that Gov. DeWine and ODH acknowledge that fact.
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In my last post, I showed how the new 'Key Measures' ICU map was distorting the data by looking only at the comparison of COVID positive (not necessarily ill with COVID) patients versus -
- vs the number of total patients in the ICU - not the percentage of COVD positive patients out of the total number of ICU beds.
So what if they went back to simply the percentage of COVID positive patients out of all available ICU beds? First, the numbers would not be as scary, and second, the total number of beds available in a region is not stable from one day to the next.
As noted in my last post, Gov. DeWine has signaled a movement away from the Ohio Public Health Advisory System (aka, the Map of Fear) because under the new rules, the state will be stuck in red perpetually with sufficient testing.
So to replace this map, he announced two new maps, to be updated weekly and found at coronavirus.ohio.gov/static/OPHASM/…
These two measures look at cases per capita WHICH CAN BE CONTROLLED SOLELY BY TESTING WITH FAULTY TESTS AND IS SEVERELY PUNITIVE TO RURAL COUNTIES.
The second map shows ICU utilization by region (first attached image), and these percentages look quite alarming.
* But wait, there's more!
I just posted about an odd change in an odd entry I stumbled across in today's CSV file.
But there's even more to this story. Whenever I post these 'long COVID' entries, I usually get some pushback about maybe people having COVID so badly that they end up back in the hospital months down the road.
Ok. Absolutely valid possibility (still not appropriate labeling them as a current COVID case, but I digress).
So I went back into the old csv files to see if this 60-69 year old Montgomery County man existed in the file as having the 4/14 onset date -
This one really bothered me during yesterday's press conference. The [linked] video [below] is of Dr. Andy Thomas of Wexner Medical Center saying things that sound really scary. None of what he said is untrue, but it gives a perception that is vastly different than reality.
facebook.com/15501424/video…
Yes, ~1/3 of all patients in the ICU or on a ventilator are COVID-positive (or at least once tested positive at some point in the last 8 months as my posts yesterday demonstrated).
But then he went on to the old threat of COVID 'crowding' other procedures out. First, there is significant regular capacity still available in the ICU (and as he noted, even the facility with 'trouble' was able to increase to 130%).
Something is extremely odd with indicator #7 of the OPHAS system. I have addressed this before in regards to region 6 of Ohio (facebook.com/.../permalink/…).
As odd as region 6 was, the variation was pretty small, up to ~2% extra overall capacity used on the OPHAS version than on the dashboard.
Keep in mind, BOTH the hospitalization dashboard on coronavirus.ohio.gov and indicator #7 on the OPHAS come from the exact same entity - the Ohio Hospital Association. There shouldn't be any difference.