All throughout the winter - Metro Nashville Government's Website: Asafenashville.org, consistently reported single digit % available capacity for ICU beds, and low double digit % capacity for Floor bed. See screenshot from Jan 7th.
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Nashville has always only reported % available, and not actual numbers- yet they pull their data from Tennessee's HRTS- the same source that Knox and Shelby use and transparently report from.
So since August, we have been tracking these numbers manually since Metro doesnt provide time-series or raw numbers.
We even tried to triangulate the total bed capacity from multiple sources and came pretty close when I build my dashboard:
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We presented our data to @StacyCase_ who ran a story on this in September. It was difficult to get straight raw numbers and they still never shared as a result of this.
Fast forward to the end of the year, and over the last couple months, where I pulled data from HHS.gov that is aggregated from federal reporting requirements from hospitals, so now we can finally answer this question.
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Why the discrepancy? Why has there been this constant
"Red" Status of these metrics? According to HHS, we've actually been below these goals of 20% for floor beds and 15% of ICU the Entire time.
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Data from the Federal Government directly contradicts the @MetroNashville governments data.
Anyone out there want to dig deeper into this?
I suspect a couple reasonable explanations:
1) They are simply just calculating % available in a very different way.
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Perhaps it makes sense the way they do it. We would never know because it's never been explained.
2) There is a simple error in their reporting and they've never caught it.
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As of right now, from where I'm standing, the simple way to look at it is that data from the Federal Government directly contradicts the @MetroNashville governments data.
I'm sure this could be cleared up.
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Anyone can use this tool I created to look at the capacity over time for any area in the country. Just select dropdowns for state/county.
THREAD: Are Schools SAFE during Covid? A Collection of Research, Science, and Data on Schools: Risks to children, teachers, and comparisons within the community.
Sources: Academic, institutional or governmental. I will summarize conclusion and cite link.
Let's begin..
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European CDC:
"Investigations of cases identified in school settings suggest that child to child transmission in schools is uncommon and not the primary cause of SARS-CoV-2 infection in children ..
Imagine a scenario where a Religious leader was suddenly given executive authority over the medical communities codes of ethics, methods of treatment, and had carte blanche authority to impose value judgements upon their decisions and trade offs.
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Treatments, standards of care, and ethics are now dictated by order of the high priest.
What do you think would have happened? Doctors would have revolted and fought like hell to get their rights and protections back.
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Image that business leaders & economists were elevated overnight to the de facto authority on epidemiology and infectious disease, despite having no understanding, education, or expertise in this field. Models and risks assessments are now reduced to dollars and cents...
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Now that school is back, I think it's a good time to look back at the fall and revisit the big fear everyone had about opening schools causing "spikes" in cases.
Date Range: Mid July-End of September.
Enough time for multiple incubation periods.
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In the fall, didn't matter what learning mode the school system chose, the trends were the same. No spikes. Not even close. The idea that a single thing like school open/close could affect the trajectory should be put to bed.
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Of course from Europe we knew Schools and Children are not the drivers of the epidemic
HHS PCR Testing data shows how the holiday reporting effect screws up almost every single trendline and indicator based on testing (cases, % positive) -rendering recent days data untrustworthy.
I suspect this effect carries at the state level as well as this federal dataset.
Specifically with this one you can see the reports of negative tests decrease. Many reasons for this- likely due to holiday lots of mandatory testing regimes were on hiatus. I know many Health Depts took days off.
This will change the pool and skew towards more positives..
As you have less people testing just to test, and keep same pool of people testing because they really need to test likely due to actual symptoms.
This is speculation based on observations of reduced testing locations and hours, less school testing, etc.