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Since so many states are definitely not reporting deaths post emergency and more will probably join them, I took the number of deaths for the year ending 2023-03-31 and used that as a way of modeling how many deaths would be reported if we were still getting all the data. I chose that because 2020 had such localized outbreaks, 2020 and 2021 had so many differences in local restrictions as well as the speed and volume of vaccine uptake, whereas over the past year there've been pretty much no restrictions pretty much anywhere and vaccine levels within a given state have been much more level. The states I've marked with an "x" have explicitly said they're not reporting any more, but of course other states could have not said so yet or just aren't going to bother saying it outright, so I anticipate this being pretty fluid to start. Kinerd518 ( talk) 15:09, 14 May 2023 (UTC)
In the first two months of this project, there have been seven occasions where a state seemed to stop reporting only to resume later, resulting in a removal of x marks. If the model is perfect, the sum of these occasions should have resulted in an increase in reported deaths and no change at all in modeled deaths. What actually happened summing over all those occasions was an increase of 343 in reported deaths and an increase of 14 in modeled deaths. There is no evidence the model is flawed, and it may be very slightly conservative.
Using the modeled totals, there are two states on either end that are massive outliers from the last reported year, and both have shown remarkable irregularities in reporting per se.
Virginia would be expected to report 138 deaths, broadly similar to the 229 and 177 actually reported by similarly populated Michigan and Arizona respectively. Virginia in fact reported 24 deaths, comparable to the 29 and 22 actually reported by much smaller Utah and Vermont respectively. While it is relatively common for a state to report a large negative death result due to a change in methodology, Virginia multiple times in this period reported negative deaths with no explanation.
Kentucky would be expected to report 151 deaths, broadly similar to the 121 and 78 actually reported by similarly populated Minnesota and Louisiana respectively. Kentucky in fact reported 374, more than the 240 and 276 actually reported by much larger New York and Texas respectively. Kentucky like some other state websites does not display a total but requires mass selection to sum to a total, and like some other state websites defaults to a useless date range. Unlike any other state website, Kentucky defaults to two distinct useless date ranges (through 11 Feb 2023 on one section and through 26 Sep 2022 on another), offers different sums depending on which graphic is chosen(!), and changes the "updated on" date on that basis as well(!!!).
Obfuscation is common in COVID reporting, and it is unlikely based on prior experience that contacting these two states directly will offer any clarity, but with nothing to lose I am going to try to do so anyway. For now I will continue to include their claimed reports without modification. Kinerd518 ( talk) 17:59, 17 July 2023 (UTC)
In the first six months of this project, there have been twelve occasions where a state stopped reporting only to resume later, resulting in a removal of x marks. If the model is perfect, the sum of these occasions should have resulted in an increase in reported deaths and no change at all in modeled deaths. What actually happened summing over all those occasions was an increase of 663 in reported deaths and a decrease of 42 in modeled deaths. There is no evidence the model is flawed, and it may be very slightly liberal.
Virginia remains the massive outlier of states still reporting in terms of underperforming the model, having reported 140 deaths when the model would expect it to report 500. Virginia has reported fewer deaths than New Mexico, West Virginia, Hawaii - clearly nonsense. I will contact them again, and do not expect any more response than last time. Kinerd518 ( talk) 21:18, 12 November 2023 (UTC)
Florida increased their reported death total by 7,052 overnight. There is no explanation given whatsoever, including any indication of a definition change, and the change being extremely non uniform seems to me to rule that out: only 65 deaths were newly reported from 2020 to 2022, although some were in each year, leaving 6,987(!!!) newly reported deaths for 2023 alone, including 3,544 in the date range of this chart. Through 27 Oct 2023, Florida had been reporting on a roughly biweekly schedule, following which they reported daily, and their current resource offers data broken down by week, notably in a spreadsheet that is separate from and consistent with the yearly break down, which seems to rule out data entry error. I chose to re-enter all the data in this date period by week rather than put nearly 7,000 deaths as occurring today, and I increased the starting value by 3,508 to cover the 2020 through 12 May 2023 newly reported deaths. When I previously analyzed states for outliers relative to the previous year, Florida has not been particularly striking, and had if anything already been a little above expectations. I am at a complete loss to explain this, but I do feel the way I have charted it is the best we can do to reflect what they are currently claiming. Kinerd518 ( talk) 18:55, 18 December 2023 (UTC)
For this page, I found that the data is still available for Vermont (on the last page, see past surveillance for historical data) and Oregon (sum up all the numbers in the second section to get the total), and Kansas' data remained available until the end of last month (see here). It would be good if you could update the template! Horizon Sunset ( talk) 13:07, 23 June 2023 (UTC)
Hello Kinerd518, thank you for updating this page daily. I would like to know what you do when a state stops reporting cumulative fatality count but continue to report weekly count, such situation can get messy easily, as a state might be backfilling its data. And if possible, can you include Iowa also?
Iowa's weekly fatality count is available in its flu reports, but the cumulative count isn't reported, so I am not quite sure if it is possible to use it.
Mississippi's fatality count is recently updated here.
Arizona recently stopped reporting cumulative count, but the total death count I found by summing up the age group is slightly different from the counts reported.
Finally, for Kentucky, the weekly fatality counts on the new dashboard match almost perfectly with the previous dashboard, with the exception of the last week, which might be due to backfilling. -- Horizon Sunset ( talk) 04:59, 1 December 2023 (UTC)
Thank you very much for integrating them into table. I would've done that myself if I knew how the modelled deaths are calculated.
There is a definition of 2022-23 total listed for IA, for example here, on the last page, it is defined as "cumulative from the start of the flu season (October 2, 2022 through the end of the current reporting week)". However, this figure doesn't seem to match perfectly with the historical data, probably due to backfilling. So you may choose to include it at your discretion.
You are right about AZ. Summing up the cases for the previous three seasons by age group would give 2,406,363 which is slightly smaller than actual count (2,406,967) (and summing up the three year average and multiply by 3 gives 2,406,975, which is really close to the correct value). Nonetheless, it appears that the sum by age group is greater than the sum recorded in the table. For example, summing up each age group gives 34,356, which is greater than the 33,967 recorded in the data. Summing up weeks and multiply by 3 doesn't work well as first week's data are apparently incomplete.
Based on the downloaded csv file for KY, there is a discrepancy between last three reporting weeks (8/27, 9/3, and 9/10) of the old dashboard and the same three weeks of the new dashboard , I think the counts from the new one should be used as it describes a more complete data. Horizon Sunset ( talk) 06:07, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
I agree with your opinion on Iowa.
You didn't misunderstand me this time! For AZ, it wasn't until late September when the state modified the dashboard and remove the total count that this discrepancy happened. So I don't think anything before 9/27 should be changed. Since the first dashboard version after this is no longer available, I think the change can start at around 11/22, when the value was 34,336, which I recorded in my update at Template:COVID-19 pandemic data/United States medical cases by state, instead of 33,947. I think method of calculation should remain unchanged (meaning the value reported when they are reported should still be used after this point) beyond this to avoid amplifying the error of unknown ages.
Kentucky: I totally agree that editing backward isn't worth it, and thank you for explaining how the model works. But before further explaining my concern may I ask how did you get the value of 19,256 based on the last available total count of 19,183? Horizon Sunset ( talk) 23:09, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
Kentucky:OK here is what I was thinking. I agree with the 66 from the current season. But the number of backfills is more than 7.
In old dashboard, the sum from the last several weeks are:
16+11+14=41
Compared to new dashboard:
17+15+20=52
So this is 11 counts (I checked the data from previous weeks and found little discrepancy between the dashboards prior to 8/27/2023)
Also note that the old dashboard only includes data up to 9/10. So the weeks of 9/17 and 9/24 aren't included in either the old dashboard or the current season of the new dashboard. According to the previous season of the new dashboard, the count should be 8+18=26.
So in total, there should be 37 backfills.
Even though it's not as likely, it's nice to always keep an eye on those values from previous season to see if they change. Horizon Sunset ( talk) 18:15, 6 December 2023 (UTC)
OK thank you very much!!!! Since you have 56 jurisdictions to check, it's easy to miss out on a specific state. Again thank you for updating this chart daily!-- Horizon Sunset ( talk) 20:22, 6 December 2023 (UTC)
VA reported 14 new deaths and 570 previously unreported deaths ranging from 1 Jan 2022 to 15 Dec 2023. They made no public comment whatsoever acknowledging this, and in fact the only tweet today from the VA Dept of Health contains a proud declaration that "we are dedicated to protecting and promoting the health of all Virginians". Although it would be possible to rebuild the numbers they posted all along at least in this template's date range, the sheer scope and shocking blatancy of the report gives me even less reason to trust their numbers now than when it was obvious they were intentionally holding back from reporting them; although there certainly weren't 570 deaths in the past couple of weeks, frankly I just don't believe the deaths happened when VA claims they did either. As before, this situation is deeply depressing and I feel that all I can do is record. Kinerd518 ( talk) 19:21, 2 January 2024 (UTC)
In the first year of this project, there have been 22 occasions where a state stopped reporting only to resume later, resulting in a removal of x marks. If the model is perfect, the sum of these occasions should have resulted in an increase in reported deaths and no change at all in modeled deaths. What actually happened summing over all those occasions was an increase of 4,568 in reported deaths and an increase of 1,019 in modeled deaths. There is evidence the model is conservative.
The underlying assumption of the model is that a state's proportion of national deaths in the last year of the declared emergency is equal to its proportion of national deaths post emergency, since there was extremely little change in the relative measures taken state to state - barely anyone was getting vaccinated any more so a state that was already way ahead in vaccination would be as far ahead as it was before, there were no requests to mask or distance anywhere, etc. I still believe this assumption is correct, but I have nevertheless come to believe that the model has a flaw, which is that we only have a state's *reported* proportion of national deaths in the last year of the declared emergency, a number that does not necessarily match a state's *actual* proportion of national deaths. By definition, this review only looks at a state that reported erratically during the past year, and I have finally come to believe that this is correlated with the same state reporting erratically prior, illustrated most dramatically by IL but also by MS and WI. Though outside the scope of this review, we also see this correlation in the above detailed adventures of FL and VA reporting.
There is no way around this, but since we know the model has demonstrated about 10,000 deaths were hidden in this first year, we can estimate that it should have seen about another 2,200 people lost. All failure is dispiriting, and one that couldn't see the intentional obfuscation of thousands of deaths is especially so. There is no way around this. We must continue watching, and recording. Kinerd518 ( talk) 20:08, 13 May 2024 (UTC)
![]() | This template does not require a rating on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Since so many states are definitely not reporting deaths post emergency and more will probably join them, I took the number of deaths for the year ending 2023-03-31 and used that as a way of modeling how many deaths would be reported if we were still getting all the data. I chose that because 2020 had such localized outbreaks, 2020 and 2021 had so many differences in local restrictions as well as the speed and volume of vaccine uptake, whereas over the past year there've been pretty much no restrictions pretty much anywhere and vaccine levels within a given state have been much more level. The states I've marked with an "x" have explicitly said they're not reporting any more, but of course other states could have not said so yet or just aren't going to bother saying it outright, so I anticipate this being pretty fluid to start. Kinerd518 ( talk) 15:09, 14 May 2023 (UTC)
In the first two months of this project, there have been seven occasions where a state seemed to stop reporting only to resume later, resulting in a removal of x marks. If the model is perfect, the sum of these occasions should have resulted in an increase in reported deaths and no change at all in modeled deaths. What actually happened summing over all those occasions was an increase of 343 in reported deaths and an increase of 14 in modeled deaths. There is no evidence the model is flawed, and it may be very slightly conservative.
Using the modeled totals, there are two states on either end that are massive outliers from the last reported year, and both have shown remarkable irregularities in reporting per se.
Virginia would be expected to report 138 deaths, broadly similar to the 229 and 177 actually reported by similarly populated Michigan and Arizona respectively. Virginia in fact reported 24 deaths, comparable to the 29 and 22 actually reported by much smaller Utah and Vermont respectively. While it is relatively common for a state to report a large negative death result due to a change in methodology, Virginia multiple times in this period reported negative deaths with no explanation.
Kentucky would be expected to report 151 deaths, broadly similar to the 121 and 78 actually reported by similarly populated Minnesota and Louisiana respectively. Kentucky in fact reported 374, more than the 240 and 276 actually reported by much larger New York and Texas respectively. Kentucky like some other state websites does not display a total but requires mass selection to sum to a total, and like some other state websites defaults to a useless date range. Unlike any other state website, Kentucky defaults to two distinct useless date ranges (through 11 Feb 2023 on one section and through 26 Sep 2022 on another), offers different sums depending on which graphic is chosen(!), and changes the "updated on" date on that basis as well(!!!).
Obfuscation is common in COVID reporting, and it is unlikely based on prior experience that contacting these two states directly will offer any clarity, but with nothing to lose I am going to try to do so anyway. For now I will continue to include their claimed reports without modification. Kinerd518 ( talk) 17:59, 17 July 2023 (UTC)
In the first six months of this project, there have been twelve occasions where a state stopped reporting only to resume later, resulting in a removal of x marks. If the model is perfect, the sum of these occasions should have resulted in an increase in reported deaths and no change at all in modeled deaths. What actually happened summing over all those occasions was an increase of 663 in reported deaths and a decrease of 42 in modeled deaths. There is no evidence the model is flawed, and it may be very slightly liberal.
Virginia remains the massive outlier of states still reporting in terms of underperforming the model, having reported 140 deaths when the model would expect it to report 500. Virginia has reported fewer deaths than New Mexico, West Virginia, Hawaii - clearly nonsense. I will contact them again, and do not expect any more response than last time. Kinerd518 ( talk) 21:18, 12 November 2023 (UTC)
Florida increased their reported death total by 7,052 overnight. There is no explanation given whatsoever, including any indication of a definition change, and the change being extremely non uniform seems to me to rule that out: only 65 deaths were newly reported from 2020 to 2022, although some were in each year, leaving 6,987(!!!) newly reported deaths for 2023 alone, including 3,544 in the date range of this chart. Through 27 Oct 2023, Florida had been reporting on a roughly biweekly schedule, following which they reported daily, and their current resource offers data broken down by week, notably in a spreadsheet that is separate from and consistent with the yearly break down, which seems to rule out data entry error. I chose to re-enter all the data in this date period by week rather than put nearly 7,000 deaths as occurring today, and I increased the starting value by 3,508 to cover the 2020 through 12 May 2023 newly reported deaths. When I previously analyzed states for outliers relative to the previous year, Florida has not been particularly striking, and had if anything already been a little above expectations. I am at a complete loss to explain this, but I do feel the way I have charted it is the best we can do to reflect what they are currently claiming. Kinerd518 ( talk) 18:55, 18 December 2023 (UTC)
For this page, I found that the data is still available for Vermont (on the last page, see past surveillance for historical data) and Oregon (sum up all the numbers in the second section to get the total), and Kansas' data remained available until the end of last month (see here). It would be good if you could update the template! Horizon Sunset ( talk) 13:07, 23 June 2023 (UTC)
Hello Kinerd518, thank you for updating this page daily. I would like to know what you do when a state stops reporting cumulative fatality count but continue to report weekly count, such situation can get messy easily, as a state might be backfilling its data. And if possible, can you include Iowa also?
Iowa's weekly fatality count is available in its flu reports, but the cumulative count isn't reported, so I am not quite sure if it is possible to use it.
Mississippi's fatality count is recently updated here.
Arizona recently stopped reporting cumulative count, but the total death count I found by summing up the age group is slightly different from the counts reported.
Finally, for Kentucky, the weekly fatality counts on the new dashboard match almost perfectly with the previous dashboard, with the exception of the last week, which might be due to backfilling. -- Horizon Sunset ( talk) 04:59, 1 December 2023 (UTC)
Thank you very much for integrating them into table. I would've done that myself if I knew how the modelled deaths are calculated.
There is a definition of 2022-23 total listed for IA, for example here, on the last page, it is defined as "cumulative from the start of the flu season (October 2, 2022 through the end of the current reporting week)". However, this figure doesn't seem to match perfectly with the historical data, probably due to backfilling. So you may choose to include it at your discretion.
You are right about AZ. Summing up the cases for the previous three seasons by age group would give 2,406,363 which is slightly smaller than actual count (2,406,967) (and summing up the three year average and multiply by 3 gives 2,406,975, which is really close to the correct value). Nonetheless, it appears that the sum by age group is greater than the sum recorded in the table. For example, summing up each age group gives 34,356, which is greater than the 33,967 recorded in the data. Summing up weeks and multiply by 3 doesn't work well as first week's data are apparently incomplete.
Based on the downloaded csv file for KY, there is a discrepancy between last three reporting weeks (8/27, 9/3, and 9/10) of the old dashboard and the same three weeks of the new dashboard , I think the counts from the new one should be used as it describes a more complete data. Horizon Sunset ( talk) 06:07, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
I agree with your opinion on Iowa.
You didn't misunderstand me this time! For AZ, it wasn't until late September when the state modified the dashboard and remove the total count that this discrepancy happened. So I don't think anything before 9/27 should be changed. Since the first dashboard version after this is no longer available, I think the change can start at around 11/22, when the value was 34,336, which I recorded in my update at Template:COVID-19 pandemic data/United States medical cases by state, instead of 33,947. I think method of calculation should remain unchanged (meaning the value reported when they are reported should still be used after this point) beyond this to avoid amplifying the error of unknown ages.
Kentucky: I totally agree that editing backward isn't worth it, and thank you for explaining how the model works. But before further explaining my concern may I ask how did you get the value of 19,256 based on the last available total count of 19,183? Horizon Sunset ( talk) 23:09, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
Kentucky:OK here is what I was thinking. I agree with the 66 from the current season. But the number of backfills is more than 7.
In old dashboard, the sum from the last several weeks are:
16+11+14=41
Compared to new dashboard:
17+15+20=52
So this is 11 counts (I checked the data from previous weeks and found little discrepancy between the dashboards prior to 8/27/2023)
Also note that the old dashboard only includes data up to 9/10. So the weeks of 9/17 and 9/24 aren't included in either the old dashboard or the current season of the new dashboard. According to the previous season of the new dashboard, the count should be 8+18=26.
So in total, there should be 37 backfills.
Even though it's not as likely, it's nice to always keep an eye on those values from previous season to see if they change. Horizon Sunset ( talk) 18:15, 6 December 2023 (UTC)
OK thank you very much!!!! Since you have 56 jurisdictions to check, it's easy to miss out on a specific state. Again thank you for updating this chart daily!-- Horizon Sunset ( talk) 20:22, 6 December 2023 (UTC)
VA reported 14 new deaths and 570 previously unreported deaths ranging from 1 Jan 2022 to 15 Dec 2023. They made no public comment whatsoever acknowledging this, and in fact the only tweet today from the VA Dept of Health contains a proud declaration that "we are dedicated to protecting and promoting the health of all Virginians". Although it would be possible to rebuild the numbers they posted all along at least in this template's date range, the sheer scope and shocking blatancy of the report gives me even less reason to trust their numbers now than when it was obvious they were intentionally holding back from reporting them; although there certainly weren't 570 deaths in the past couple of weeks, frankly I just don't believe the deaths happened when VA claims they did either. As before, this situation is deeply depressing and I feel that all I can do is record. Kinerd518 ( talk) 19:21, 2 January 2024 (UTC)
In the first year of this project, there have been 22 occasions where a state stopped reporting only to resume later, resulting in a removal of x marks. If the model is perfect, the sum of these occasions should have resulted in an increase in reported deaths and no change at all in modeled deaths. What actually happened summing over all those occasions was an increase of 4,568 in reported deaths and an increase of 1,019 in modeled deaths. There is evidence the model is conservative.
The underlying assumption of the model is that a state's proportion of national deaths in the last year of the declared emergency is equal to its proportion of national deaths post emergency, since there was extremely little change in the relative measures taken state to state - barely anyone was getting vaccinated any more so a state that was already way ahead in vaccination would be as far ahead as it was before, there were no requests to mask or distance anywhere, etc. I still believe this assumption is correct, but I have nevertheless come to believe that the model has a flaw, which is that we only have a state's *reported* proportion of national deaths in the last year of the declared emergency, a number that does not necessarily match a state's *actual* proportion of national deaths. By definition, this review only looks at a state that reported erratically during the past year, and I have finally come to believe that this is correlated with the same state reporting erratically prior, illustrated most dramatically by IL but also by MS and WI. Though outside the scope of this review, we also see this correlation in the above detailed adventures of FL and VA reporting.
There is no way around this, but since we know the model has demonstrated about 10,000 deaths were hidden in this first year, we can estimate that it should have seen about another 2,200 people lost. All failure is dispiriting, and one that couldn't see the intentional obfuscation of thousands of deaths is especially so. There is no way around this. We must continue watching, and recording. Kinerd518 ( talk) 20:08, 13 May 2024 (UTC)