Thread by @GrantRants

A quick side trip into local #COVID19 data, because it is going to come up this afternoon at a @NiagaraRegion public health committee. Specifically, a local anti-vaxer is attempting to use data I present on this account regularly to falsely claim there is no crisis. (thread)

This afternoon, one time PPC candidate and local anti-vaxer Rebecca Hahn is presenting to the committee, claiming masks are ineffective, vaccines are bad, and there is no crisis in hospitals. Part of her presentation will include this chart:

Those of who follow my data breaksdowns may recognize that chart. It is a look at the total number of #COVID19 patients at @niagarahealth broken down by age and vaccine status since Aug 7 when the data became available.

public.flourish.studio/visualisation/…

As you can see, the data shows that the majority of #COVID19 patients at Niagara hospitals are unvaccinated patients.

Hahn is doing some pretty sketchy math to try and show there is no issue with #COVID19 patients in hospitals, and of unvaccinated patients in particular. But the math is wildly inaccurate. So let's break it down, shall we?

The first thing she does is round down the total number of patients by Nov. 25 to 70. Then she divides that number by 5 - the number of @NRPublicHealth sites, to produce the figure of 14. What does this number show you?
Nothing.

The calculation assumes an even distribution of patients across all five sites, which is wildly inaccurate. Two sites aren't even full-service hospitals. It also assumes this is how you calculate a hospitalization rate, which it is not how you do it, but we'll get there.

She then takes the 14 - a number that signifies nothing - and divides it by the number of weeks in chart, 15. That figure, 0.9, she is purporting is the weekly hospitalization rate. Therefore, "where is the crisis?" if there is less than one patient a week with COVID in hospital?

This is not how you calculate a hospitalization rate at all, ignores what is actually happening in the community and presents a false impression of what is going on with the virus, vaccination status and hospitalizations.

To do a basic hospitalization rate you take the residents of a defined area who are hospitalized with #COVID19 and divided by the total population within that defined area. To do comparative rate, you then want to do additional math to make it per 10k or 100k.

You would use the rate to determine, in part, how Niagara fares compared to other regions. Which would be a useful bit of math to do. But that is not what she has done because she has not calculated anything useful.

Again, you cannot just divide the total number of patients by the number of hospital sites to get a rate. That is an entirely meaningless number.

Patients have also been arriving in waves. As viral activity increases, we see more patients. As it falls less. And as we see more, we see the majority of those are unvaccinated:

Niagara COVID-19 hospitalizations vs. vaccinations public.flourish.studio/visualisation/…

As you can see, there are now 19 #COVID19 patients at @niagarahealth, 14 of which are unvaccinated. Most of which are new patients in the last week.

What also gets ignored in this voodoo math is the impact a growing number of #COVID19 patients has on the hospital overall. This claim of "where is the crisis" almost presumes there are no other patients in need of care.

The more #COVID19 patients are in the hospital - and if they are there, they are very sick - the more space and resources they consume. That is bed space and resources not going to other patients.

This is why officials are always hand wringing over ICU numbers and bed occupancy. Because those numbers were under strain before the pandemic. COVID-19 has pushed hospitals to their limits.

A thought experiment: If a hospital has 100 patient beds, and 20 of them are for #COVID19 patients, what do you do with people with other serious illnesses in need of treatment if the other 80 beds are also full?

This has been a core problem with #COVID19. It can hospitalize enough people to put an already strained hospital system under more and more stress. And where is that stress coming from now? Unvaccinated patients. The data is very clear.

Calculating rates - infection rates, hospitalizations etc - can produce useful information to help better understand the pandemic. That is why I and my colleagues have published this kind of data since the pandemic started. So you are informed.

But if your base calculations are entirely wrong, as they are here, you present a funhouse mirror version of what is actually happening, and at best the data is useless. At worse, it leads to bad decisions by the public and policymakers.

And this is just one, very basic, bit of math this presentation gets very, very wrong. That is why we call it disinformation.

I will be back later this week, but the usual data breakdown of local #COVID19 metrics.

@bill_standard is covering the region today. Follow him for updates.

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Be safe, be smart and be kind. Get your vacations. Stand together, and we'll get through this.

**that should be @niagarahealth sites, not @NRPublicHealth! The curse of autofill strikes again.

Postscript: The health committee voted not to allow Hahn to speak after receiving a letter from public health that itemized some of the disinformation in her presentation.