Two weeks have now passed since this happened, according to the New York Times —
The Trump administration has ordered hospitals to bypass the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and send all Covid-19 patient information to a central database in Washington beginning on Wednesday. The move has alarmed health experts who fear the data will be politicized or withheld from the public.
Conveniently, Johns Hopkins University of Medicine’s display of the CDC’s State by State reports of new Covid-19 infections signifies each State’s progress, at flattening the infection curve, with red and green tinted bands, as described in the key, covering exactly a two week span. It’s two weeks because CDC guidelines suggest no reopening take place at all until a State achieves a downturn in new cases for at least that long. That makes today an excellent occasion to take a look at how trends are reported to be moving, now that political hands in the Trump Administration have had its first full two weeks to manipulate the data before the CDC even sees the numbers.
Lo, what do we behold but the miracle that Trump has been predicting since February. Using the new, magic numbers premasticated by Trump’s politicized Department of Health and Human Services, the colorful graphs now display a sudden turnaround in many of the hotspots that have been such a drag on Presidential popularity, particularly in emerging Southern battlegrounds.
In just two weeks, with hardly any action by the Trump Administration on a National level, and equally feeble efforts in most Southern States, the spiking trends of new Covid-19 cases has been somehow reversed in the South’s most populous States, including Texas, Florida and Georgia, as well as other GOP controlled States like Arizona, North Carolina, South Carolina and Alabama. These states have lagged on mandatory mask requirements, have reopened all sorts of indoor interactions among strangers for the sake of commerce, and are running headlong into public school re-openings. Yet, somehow, if these graphs of DHHS cooked numbers are to be believed, hotspot after hotspot, especially in the GOP South, has enjoyed a sudden two-week downturn in new cases. A miracle indeed.
Yet, at the same time, in another example that reality has become a mere matter of opinion under Donald John Trump, the President’s very own Coronavirus Task Force released a report of hotspot States that totally muddies, if not directly contradicts, the DHHS State by State Covid-19 case increase numbers. According to what the Task force said, just yesterday, 21 States have such high rates of new cases that they should be closing down, rather than continuing to open up, with new infections exceeding 100 per 100,000 people, in —
Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Wisconsin
So which is it, Governors Abbott (R-TX), DeSantis (R-FL) and Kemp (R-GA)? Will you believe the Coronavirus Task Force’s recommendation to start shutting your States back down, or the happy graphs of DHHS’s freshly cooked and allegedly declining case numbers for the last two weeks, signifying a supposed chance to reopen safely? Your reality-indifferent President has gifted you with your choice of which science to follow and a license to pretend the Pandemic is no longer a deadly threat to you and your fellow citizens.
But, back out here in The Real World, where facts aren’t a matter of mere opinion, an unchecked, possibly unstoppable disease still rages. Given the political atmosphere and official programs of disinformation, this will continue.
But a grift like cooking the Covid-19 stats can’t go on long enough to save the day for the GOP. While phony government numbers on a website may have some power, images of refrigerated morgue trucks in the streets and mass graves on public land have even more. In the meantime, it’s increasingly clear that US Government reporting of national and State by State Covid-19 statistics have become useless, or worse, dangerous.