Most coverage of Monday’s Murphy COVID-19 presser understandably focused on his nothing burger of a reopening announcement, Save Jerseyans.
You may’ve overlooked the part when Department of Health Communicable Disease Service Director Ed Lifshitz announced that yeah, oops, 10,442 COVID-19 “cases” reported by the state of New Jersey weren’t real. They were duplicates.
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“Today, we are subtracting 10,442 confirmed cases, leaving today’s total confirmed cumulative cases actually lower than yesterday,” reported Lifshitz during the briefing. “I just wanted to take a moment to explain this one-time drop. Cleaning of data, a process by which we continually review cases and data in our system for duplicates and errors, has been performed by the Communicable Disease Service since the beginning of the outbreak. Duplicates are identified and the cases are merged into one. This cleaning has been done manually, and it has been effective. However, given the large number of cases in the system, it has not been possible to identify all duplicate entries and manually correct them each day. CDS has worked with health information technology staff to develop an automated method to manually correct them each day. We applied this automated method to the database yesterday, and this one-time drop of approximately 1.2% in the cumulative number of cases was the result. Moving forward, this automated process will be performed on a weekly basis to supplement the manual daily data cleaning. Since this cleaning will happen weekly together with the ongoing manual data cleaning, variation in the cumulative case counts will be small.”
These “duplicates” add up to approximately 1.2% of all COVID-19 state cases disclosed through Monday.
“I can only imagine how the conversation went down,” mused News12’s Kurt Siegelin, a COVID-19 watchdog, via his social media page. “Dr. Ed Lifshitz passing word to the Governor or the Governor’s people that there’s a problem with the data. Lifshitz had just finished a first-ever (and that’s a story in of itself) automated review of all the state’s covid cases yesterday to remove the duplicates. People who tested positive twice were being removed as doubles. The results were off from the previously manually-tabulated numbers. A correction was needed. But not only that. Because the results were SO off, Lifshitz felt compelled to come to the Governor’s people. Then together they decided that number is just so ginormous there must be a public explanation. What a conversation that must have been. The state having to own up to a mistake of their own doing. It’s rich because this administration doesn’t do corrections publicly — or at least try not to. Of course when you erase 10,442 cases from the total in one day, I guess you’ve hit the bar of “Public needs to know.”
Couldn’t have said it better myself, Save Jerseyans.
Transparency is an ongoing issue with the Murphy Administration. That’s inarguable. How the state decides to report cases is manipulative. How many more errors have been missed? Haven’t been disclosed? Will be in the weeks and months to come after more businesses and humans are dead?
The deeper layer: our rights CONTINUE to be restricted – from how you can run your business and whether you kids gets to go to school to where you can eat and when you can dance – based upon “data” that’s deeply, deeply suspect.
We’re being ruled – yes, ruled – by bad, dishonest people who cannot be trusted. You knew it before this latest twist. So did I. The task ahead is to take this hard evidence and inform as many voters as possible before November.
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