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.
Until you understand where they are coming from. If you look at coronavirus.ohio.gov/.../key.../hos… and look at ICU bed utilization by these same regions, the percentages are nowhere near what is listed on the new map.
What has happened? This is shown in the second image. Instead of looking at COVID positive (not necessarily ill with COVID) utilization out of the total ICU beds, they have decided to look at the percentage of COVID+ patients out of the total number of ICU beds *utilized.*
⭐️⭐️⭐️ What this means is that if there are 100 total ICU beds in a region and 1 is occupied by a COVID positive patient (again, not necessarily in the ICU because of COVID) and 1 patient that is not COVID positive, under this new measure -
, that region would have 50% COVID utilization. If there is just 1 COVID positive patient and 0 non-COVID patients, the COVID utilization would be 100%. ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Also, the number of COVID patients could remain the same from day to day, or even decrease, and depending on the number of other ICU occupants, the utilization % could actually increase. This is nonsense.
The final suspect aspect of this new 'Key Measure' is, yet again, there is no sense of magnitude. I have attached Region 7's data, the second 'worst' in the state. But when we look at absolute numbers -
- , we can see that this region of 431,109 people has had an average of just 21 COVID positive patients in the ICU on any given day between 12/17 and 12/23. That's 0.00494% of that region's population.
⭐️⭐️⭐️Even more incredible, the average number of EMPTY ICU beds in the region is ~24 during that same week. COVID positive ICU bed use could double in the region, and they still wouldn't be at capacity.
Yet again, we have data skewed to the most alarmist possible take, and skewed with ever more creative methods. At what point will Gov. DeWine and ODH stop trying to terrify the state into financial ruin and finally acknowledge that the worst case scenario will never come to pass?
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.
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.
* 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.