1/ Help needed!!! Do any journalists want investigate this issue and get the CDC to comment on it? It appears their Data Tracker has major issues when it comes to pediatric death reporting. We deserve accurate data when so much is on the line for our kids!
2/ The NCHS and AAP data on pediatric COVID deaths are pretty similar, but the Data Tracker is way higher than other sources - but only for pediatric deaths. So it's not just data lag as some are claiming. And they've admitted to "data discrepancies" with this data twice already!
3/ It's really hard to have reasonable discussions on children and COVID when one group cites ~1300 pediatric deaths and the other cites ~800, and both are getting their data from the CDC. This is shameful incompetence from a federal institution.
4/ Please, if you are a journalist, or if you know one you can pass this on to, it needs to be addressed. We need a consistent source of the truth. The CDC has said the NCHS data is the more authoritative source. So why haven't they fixed the Data Tracker?
What's that? Just @cdcgov finally admitting they had a coding error with the Data Tracker deaths!!! They quietly removed 416 pediatric deaths this afternoon. Will there be any apologies from all the people who have been spreading panic with the old incorrect numbers?!?
Here's a comparison of the old and new Data Tracker numbers, as well as NCHS data by year vs the new Data Tracker numbers. Data Tracker still overcounts deaths ONLY for pediatrics and undercounts for all other age groups. 🧐data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provision…
Must read! The paper that's discussed, by Dr. Henderson, is what helped me back in early 2020 understand how we'd ignored his warnings about what NOT do during a pandemic - masking, healthy quarantines, long-term school closures, etc. Wish we'd followed Dr. Henderson's advice...
More data dumping in Southeast/Coastal Georgia today. Will @GaDPH or @coastalhealth91 issue a statement? Today, 367 cases were reported in Chatham, mostly from January. 86% of today's reported cases in Chatham are more than 2 months old! (FYI, @billdawers)
@GaDPH@coastalhealth91@billdawers Georgia's statewide numbers are small enough now that this data dumping is enough to affect the state metrics, and it caused our 7-day case avg to go up a bit. About 60% of the cases reported today in Georgia are more than 2 months old.
FYI... Coastal Health District @coastalhealth91 did post a notice on their web site about the data dump in the region yesterday.
1/ The more I see this article get shared or this statistic referenced on Twitter or elsewhere in the media, the more angry I get that the CDC hasn't fixed their broken Data Tracker. This story should not have been published - this statistic is NOT correct.
2/ I've tweeted a bunch about how the Data Tracker overstates pediatric and young adult deaths while under-reporting deaths in older age groups. It's just NOT an accurate source of data.
3/ As of today, the Data Tracker has 1656 pediatric deaths and NCHS has 894 pediatric deaths. In the past month, the Data Tracker increased by 374 deaths, while the NCHS data increased by a much more realistic 98 deaths.
1/ This is a tragic story, but despite a positive COVID test, this boy's death was caused by a rare but dangerous Melioidosis (bacterial) infection. Yet all the details line up with a highly publicized "COVID" death in a 5 year old Georgia boy. nbcnews.com/health/health-…
2/ The spray was being sold as a test at a limited number of Walmart stores. The only GA store that had it was in Calhoun, GA, where this boy lived. Both stories involve a 5 year old GA boy hospitalized on July 12, who had a stroke and died on July 16. nbcnews.com/news/us-news/5…
3/ Pediatric deaths are very tragic, no matter what the cause, and this is no exception, but this highly publicized story caused a lot of fear about COVID among parents of healthy young children, so I thought it was important to share what I found in researching this.
1/ Risks to young children from COVID have been exaggerated, resulting in significant anxiety for parents. CDC has serious data integrity issues regarding pediatric deaths, and grouping infants and preschoolers hides the low risk to children ages 2-4.
2/ This ProPublica article uses numbers from the CDC Data Tracker, which overstates pediatric and young adult deaths, and understates deaths for all other ages. Other counts of pediatric deaths from both CDC and AAP are much lower.
3/ The article also uses CDC data that groups ages 0-4 in one bucket, despite the fact that the majority of these deaths are in infants, who are more likely to die of all causes. CDC has data available per year, shown below.