CDC’s Weak Excuses for Bad Rate Data, 3118

Good morning, I’m still reporting on the coup.
A big part of this coup plot is jacking up the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic.
There is really only one number at this point that counts; how many people in the US died last week from COVID-19?
This is a fast moving crisis and it would appear that this would be information the scientists providing data and the politicians making crucial decisions about the economy would need to know but according to the CDC website accurate information on the number of deaths in the US is not available and won’t be for eight weeks.
The CDC website states this about the fatality numbers for COVID-19:
“Data during this period are incomplete because of the lag in time between when the death occurred and when the death certificate is completed, submitted to NCHS and processed for reporting purposes. This delay can range from 1 week to 8 weeks or more, depending on the jurisdiction and cause of death.”
Two months seems like a long time to wait for data about the fatality rate, but it gets worse. Another footnote on the CDC website adds this information:
“Previous analyses of 2015–2016 provisional data completeness have found that completeness is lower in the first few weeks following the date of death (<25%), and then increases over time such that data are generally at least 75% complete within 8 weeks of when the death occurred.”
So even after eight weeks the information on fatalities from the CDC is only about 75 percent complete.

And there is this explanation:
“Weekly mortality surveillance data include a combination of machine coded and manually coded causes of death collected from death certificates.”
The CDC website also notes that all COVID-19 deaths are manually coded rather than “machine” coded and that while machine coding takes seconds manual coding can take up to a week.
So after eight weeks the fatality numbers from the CDC should be 75 percent accurate in a era where any teenager can take a video of their friends and make it available to the world in seconds.
It’s frightening to imagine what “manually coded” means at the CDC. You hope that means someone sitting in front of a computer inputting information, but then with the eight week time lapse, you have to wonder if the CDC isn’t dealing with a lot of paper and snail mail.
Early in this coronavirus pandemic, the CDC made an unholy mess of the testing. In the beginning all tests had to be sent to the CDC labs because the test results weren’t consistent if performed in other labs. It put the US far behind other countries in the world in obtaining information about the spread of the disease.
Currently it appears that perhaps the most important data about COVID-19,
the number of people it is killing, isn’t available from the CDC for eight weeks.
So the CDC can’t report with any degree of accuracy how many people died from the virus in May or June, but it can report with at least 75 percent accuracy how many deaths there were in April. Perhaps in the last major flu pandemic in 1918, eight weeks was considered acceptable, but this is 2020 an era of instant communication.
About the CDC testing debacle on April 3 the Washington Post quoted Marc
Courtier, medical director at academic laboratory ARUP in Utah in a letter to fellow microbiologists as stating: “We have the skills and resources as a community but we are collectively paralyzed by a bloated bureaucratic/administrative process.”
It would appear that the US is facing similar issues with getting accurate numbers on the fatalities from the CDC now.
I’m still reporting from just outside the citadel of American freedom. Good day.