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Medicine United States

CDC Coding Error Led To Overcount of 72,000 COVID-19 Deaths (theguardian.com) 213

Posted by BeauHD from the mistakes-are-inevitable dept.
Last week, after reporting from the Guardian on mortality rates among children, the CDC corrected a "coding logic error" that had inadvertently added more than 72,000 Covid deaths of all ages to the data tracker, one of the most publicly accessible sources for Covid data. The Guardian reports: The agency briefly noted the change in a footnote, although the note did not explain how the error occurred or how long it was in effect. A total of 72,277 deaths in all age groups reported across 26 states were removed from the tracker "because CDC's algorithm was accidentally counting deaths that were not Covid-19-related," Jasmine Reed, a spokesperson for the agency, told the Guardian. The problem stemmed from two questions the CDC asks of states and jurisdictions when they report fatalities, according to a source familiar with the issue.

One data field asks if a person died "from illness/complications of illness," and the field next to this asks for the date of death. When the answer is yes, then the date of death should be provided. But a problem apparently arose if a respondent included the date of death in this field even when the answer was "no" or "unknown." The CDC's system assumed that if a date was provided, then the "no" or "unknown" answer was an error, and the system switched the answer to "yes." This resulted in an overcount of deaths due to Covid in the demographic breakdown, and the error, once discovered, was corrected last week. The CDC did not answer a question on how long the coding error was in effect.

"Working with near real-time data in an emergency is critical to guide decision-making, but may also mean we often have incomplete information when data are first reported," said Reed. The death counts in the data tracker are "real-time and subject to change," Reed noted, while numbers from the National Center for Health Statistics, a center within the CDC, are "the most complete source of death data," despite lags in reporting, because the process includes a review of death certificates.
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CDC Coding Error Led To Overcount of 72,000 COVID-19 Deaths More

CDC Coding Error Led To Overcount of 72,000 COVID-19 Deaths

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  • Those of us who have been pointing out since the beginning of this thing that there was piss-poor data separation between "with" and "from" were consistently called "conspiracy theorists", and now they're just shifting the numbers around to what we thought they should have been the whole time...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by XXongo ( 3986865 )

      Those of us who have been pointing out since the beginning of this thing that there was piss-poor data separation between "with" and "from" were consistently called "conspiracy theorists",

      While those of us who looked at the excess deaths from all causes just got ignored. Looking at excess deaths suggests that COVID-19 deaths are undercounted

      and now they're just shifting the numbers around to what we thought they should have been the whole time...

      You think the numbers should have been 7.5% lower? OK.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dmomo ( 256005 )

        Seriously. If anything it shows that they're willing to acknowledge mistakes in the data.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by taustin ( 171655 )

        Looking at excessive deaths from all causes can't distinguish between COVID deaths and deaths from heart attacks that would have been treatable if the patient wasn't too terrified to go to the hospital, or cancer deaths because treatment was considered elective, or increased suicides (one hospital reported more suicides in April of 2019 than in all of 2018).

        Meanwhile, CDC policy on reporting COVID deaths said, in plain English (it's since been couched in confusing, highly technical language, of course) that

        • Looking at excessive deaths from all causes can't distinguish between COVID deaths and deaths from heart attacks that would have been treatable if the patient wasn't too terrified to go to the hospital,

          Yes, in fact it can. Because they record deaths by heart attack. They did not increase.

          or cancer deaths because treatment was considered elective,

          Yes, it can. Because they also record cancer deaths, and they didn't go up.

          or increased suicides (one hospital reported more suicides in April of 2019 than in all of 2018).

          Yes, it can. Because they also record suicide deaths. And, in fact... they did go up. But not anywhere near enough to account for the excess deaths.

          Look, just because you don't know it, there nevertheless is very good data available.

          Meanwhile, CDC policy on reporting COVID deaths said, in plain English (it's since been couched in confusing, highly technical language, of course) that doctors should report any death in which they believed the patient had symptoms consistent with COVID as a COVID death.

          Bullshit. Stop believing all the shit you read on conspiracy sites on the internet.

          The "plain english" CDC page is

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by fermion ( 181285 )
      Unfortunately medicine is not a science so it it is easy for conspiracy theorists to promote precision that does not exist and use it to justify wing nut claims. All to often data is not reported with error bars, so the unsophisticated think it is exact, while the rest of us consider it an educated guess.

      Those who are numbers people are always looking for independent counts. For instance there were about 2.85 million deaths in 2019, about 15,000 more than 2018. In 2020, there were about 3.39 million deat

      • Boatloads of corpses could be trucked into Arizona and who would notice.

        The families of the people who died? Do you think the coroner is substituting wax figures for the corpses and their family members just think, "Oh, mom looks peaceful"? And if your imaginary corpses are being trucked, wouldn't they be truckloads and not boatloads?

        An clever coroner could easily take bodies from one state and repurpose them in another to collect addition funds, for instance.

        And how would that work? Would the families j

        • I think you mixed up Hillary Clinton with Paris Hilton?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by fermion ( 181285 )
          I donâ(TM)t think that there are any conspiracies here. During the first 20 months or so of the pandemic there were about a million excess deaths. Entering the third year of the pandemic we are approaching a million deaths attributed to COVID in the US. But a lot of people have their entire life set to believe that COVID is harmless and these deaths are wildly inflated. So how could that happen? This is one scenario. The point is that one canâ(TM)t just say magic. There has to be a credible scena

          • I wasn't really accusing you. You're right about everything but I don't see any clever coroner getting away with with mass fraud on a scale that would make it worthwhile.

            In fact, it's not death from COVID that get enhanced payments from the government, it's whether the patient was put on a ventilator. In those cases, Medicare pays additional money to cover the expenses associated with the ventilator. There were not hospitals making beaucoup bucks from calling non-COVID cases COVID. That's a fantasy.

      • and who would notice

        jesus christ, please put down the keyboard and consider never writing out your thoughts again, it's depressing people are this dumb

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by chthon ( 580889 )

          One source that people always forget in such things are the insurance companies. They always notice on shorter and longer terms. They are the best second source for such figures and trends.

    • Those of us who have been pointing out since the beginning of this thing that there was piss-poor data separation between "with" and "from" were consistently called "conspiracy theorists", and now they're just shifting the numbers around to what we thought they should have been the whole time...

      No. They were called out as being irrelevant which you still are. You can massage "with" and "from" all you like, the reality is the excess deaths statistics show that even the "inflated" figure was massively undercounting the deaths we have had related to the disease.

    • Those of us who have been pointing out since the beginning of this thing that there was piss-poor data separation between "with" and "from" were consistently called "conspiracy theorists", and now they're just shifting the numbers around to what we thought they should have been the whole time...

      Last week's "conspiracy theory" = this week's "news".

      In an unrelated matter, NYT says that the Hunter Biden laptop was, er, real after all ...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Even if the numbers were 72k too high, the death rate is still extremely high in the US.

      This error makes no difference to any of the arguments based on the number of people dying.

    • That's not why you were called a conspiracy theorist. You were called a conspiracy theorist because you followed it up by saying, "therefore COVID isn't killing people" or some such nonsense.

  • Remember when (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Baconsmoke ( 6186954 ) on Friday March 25, 2022 @10:48PM (#62390615)
    Slashdot wasn't filled with political zealots who scream inane things at the top of their lungs all the time? (sigh) What a toxic waste dump the online world has become. People who profess to be tech and science minded, but all that goes out the window whenever topics come up that feed their mindless hate. It reminds me of an episode from the original Battlestar Galactica. They found an alternate earth where the west and east were at constant war. And the people instantly decided that anything or anyone they didn't know or was different had to be from the enemy side and were spies. As a kid I thought what a stupid and simplistic view of life. People aren't really like that. Well... they fucking are like that. Pick a damn topic and view the comments and it's trolls and people screaming at each other over the dumbest things possible. What a damn waste.

    • [Remember when] Slashdot wasn't filled with political zealots who scream inane things at the top of their lungs all the time? (sigh)

      Neither can I.

    • The study of Facebook found about 400,000 people dominate the conversation and create all the crazy content and hate. That sounds like a lot until you remember the Facebook has something like 3 billion users. It's the same sort of thing with Slash Dot.

      Basically if you're still posting here you're probably older, bitter and angry. I know I am. There isn't as much new Cool tech as there used to be because cell phones took over the world so there isn't a lot to just chat about. If you're going to get in de

    • Slashdot wasn't filled with political zealots who scream inane things at the top of their lungs all the time?

      No, I don't. I don't remember such a time and neither do you, unless you were here before it was Slashdot. You just imagined it to make yourself feel like you wasted less time. You didn't.

    • Slashdot wasn't filled with political zealots who scream inane things at the top of their lungs all the time?

      No, not really. It was always full of inconsistent political zealots ... for example, H1B was sooo bad, but lotsa immigration for blue collar was moral and good.

      I do remember when it was biased more towards freedom though. And against censorship.

  • and funny thing they're mostly in red states after the vaccine became available [cbsnews.com].

    72k isn't even a drop in the bucket compared to that.
    • The vaccine becoming available doesn't mean that people in the red states are using it.

      • I thought that was what the GP was trying to say... the unexplained deaths are only significant in red states since the vaccines got widespread.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Qwertie ( 797303 )
      Not sure where you got the number "3 million" but it isn't from the article you cited, which said:

      Some 1.13 million Americans have died due to the pandemic, the researchers estimate. By comparison, the current total of reported COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. stands at around 960,000.

      72k is more than a "drop in the bucket" in this context. Like, have you any idea how much larger a bucket is than a drop?

  • The big deal is that we HAD(?) to rely on the government to tell us that the government made an error.

    If so, that's not a system that can be trusted.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by narcc ( 412956 )

      It's a lot more trustworthy than a bunch of uneducated and uninformed loudmouths repeating facebook memes.

  • The CDC's system assumed that if a date was provided, then the "no" or "unknown" answer was an error, and the system switched the answer to "yes."

    As someone who processes unclean data, this seems an entirely reasonable data processing normalization step. If a date was provided, I would also assume the respondent simply forgot to toggle the other field, because it is natural for respondents to assume that inserting a date would also imply a "yes".

    • (really /. What the F is wrong with your mobile site and mobile keyboards, really you should put the submit button right below the edit window so it doesn't border on most onscreen keyboards). I wonder how many of the deaths are actually deaths because something else but the dead had been tested positive for covid. I know in the netherlands it is a pretty solid number, just like it was/is almost 50% or higher why a patient is in hospital or ICU, as only now they are trying to separate the number op patient
  • The powers that be have and are showing that they had and have bugger all idea about Covid, but that it trumped everything else. No country has done anything more than bollocks it up.

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