A chart of COVID-19 numbers should be informative and useful, but Erie County somehow manages to miss the mark. Case in point, the image above showing a chart of deaths in the county attributed to the virus, taken from their site 9-17-2020.
What didn’t they tell you?
- Why is this chart only updated once per month? They have the data, it’s trivial to update a website.
- How many deaths were there at the time the chart was made?
- Since the numbers, even now, are still very low, 48 deaths, using percentages clouds the issue, 2% means 1 death, so why not use actual numbers?
- The age ranges are very broad, so a death in a range of ages could be at the extreme end and give a misleading impression. 25 is much different than 49.
- The upper range of this chart shows deaths over 65, but how many are much farther up in that range, like over 80?
Notice the first range starts at 25 and ends at 49, but it’s actually much wider since there are no deaths below age 25, so the range is actually 0 to 49. What this means is there has been one death under 50 years of age from COVID-19 in Erie County! It makes all of the hyperventilating about schools opening seem silly.
Why are these details important?
The impression county officials and our local media want us to have is that COVID-19 a danger to everyone and in Erie County that is clearly not the case. If the majority of deaths are in nursing homes and long term care facilities and even those that are not are almost exclusively among the very elderly, it becomes clear the majority of county residents are at, essentially, no risk at all. Think about that as your wear your mask.
We also are not being told what other underlying conditions those who died were already suffering from and as already noted, COVID-19 rarely acts alone, which means most county residents are being restricted for no reason unless politics are the primary driver of the continuing “crisis.”
Enough of this nonsense. Protect the vulnerable in nursing homes and long term care facilities, then open everything else up, completely, now. Let’s get back to work.
