I barely got finished with my story (we used to call it a diary, didn’t we?) about Mike Pence yesterday claiming that the maps showing the abating of FLU in the states were actually Covid-19 maps.
I won’t repeat the investigation from my previous story — I think I pretty well proved that the ILI data does not include Covid-19 data, most certainly not data on Covid-19 positive tests.
Tonight our CDC director, Dr. Redfield, stepped up and showed the chart above while claiming that it also includes Covid-19 data.
He pointed to the first red line peak (Flu strain A) and the second (Flu strain B), then pointed out the third peak as being from Covid-19. (The weeks are the last 12
Ummmmm……. hello?
First off, how does anyone figure that the almost vertical downward path of the red flu infections line for weeks 13 to 15 can have any relation to the actual Covid-19 infection numbers in the USA? Here is the daily new cases data:
Secondly, I went to the raw data of the CDC ILINet, and here’s what I found:
This dataset chronicles how many people (TOTAL PAT) visited one of the reporting outpatient healthcare providers (NUM. OF PROVIDERS), and out of those, how many did so for an ‘influenza-like illness’ (ILITotal), across the flu season — the last 13 weeks of 2019 through the first 15 weeks of 2020.
I set up a graph and checked several columns in this dataset to see if I could recreate the red line in the graph at the top….. and bingo:
There it is — and when I went back to the graph at the top of this story, it clearly identified itself as showing ‘Percentage of Visits for Influenza-like Illness Reported by Outpatient Providers….’
Why is this graph misleading? In weeks 8 to 12 (roughly March of this year), as the pandemic was growing rapidly, people started showing up at their doctor’s office with flu-like symptoms, a natural progression. Then what happened? State by state, the USA shut down, and people were told to stay at home, even if they were mildly symptomatic, so visits to a doctor’s office by people with flu-like symptoms dropped off drastically — which is shown in the data and graph — whether they had flu or Covid-19. We can also see that the total number of visits to an outpatient provider — for any reason — dropped by 50% between week 11 and 15.
But did Covid-19 cases fall off the cliff in weeks 13 to 15 (roughly April) as shown on the graph displayed by Dr. Redfield? Not hardly. Hell, the downward trend on that graph is only one or two weeks from hitting zero. Hallelujah! Covid-19 will be gone in a couple weeks!
So the graph shows what it says it shows, but not what Pence and Redfield tried to claim.
This evidence adds to and confirms what I found in my previous diary… err, story. I am also bothered by the fact that both Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx stood there and said nothing either day…. and they should obviously know there is no Covid-19 data in the ILI datasets. I understand the delicate balancing act they are obviously engaged in, and it’s almost inevitable that they are being corrupted like everyone else who spends a lot of time close to Trump.
I’m at a loss — I expected this kind of blatant dishonesty from Pence, but not from the CDC director.
Cheers.