librarychica , the way some counties report it, you never recover from covid. Our county, for example, does not track recoveries. So every person who has been diagnosed with covid, as far as records are concerned, still has covid. So if someone was diagnosed with covid in February, and subsequently died months later in a car accident, did they die of covid or a car accident? AFAIK, the way our reporting works, it's covid for tracking purposes.
In the example of my coworker, as she explained it (and her doctors to her, so it's admittedly a trail of hearsay) if she got a positive covid test, even if she recovered, then months later succumbed to cancer, that's a covid death.
In all honesty, I'm not sure if they have fixed this issue or not, but it is (or was?) an issue.
Every public health official believes we are undercounting both cases and deaths right now, possibly by a factor of ten. So... I’m going with we are undercounting. Probably by a lot.
And I can say from my experience being tested, getting a negative result (which went to the state as a negative result), but being told odds were good I still had it but it was just too soon since showing symptoms for the test to find it, we are counting Covid cases as negatives. Then those people aren’t counted as cases.
Post by mustardseed2007 on Aug 21, 2020 12:31:02 GMT -5
mommyatty, 100%. Also several cities in Texas aren't counting certain kinds of positive tests because the tests are unreliable even though a false positive is really unlikely and a false negative is pretty highly likely. Also our county tracks recoveries.
mustardseed2007- in my county, if no death certificate is issued within 14 days of your positive Covid test, they put you in the “recovered” column. No follow up. No negative test. No check to see if you still have symptoms. 14 days and it didn’t kill ya? You’re recovered!
We don’t have a recovered stat. I wish we would. Maybe they are just focusing on stats that would require more mitigation.
There is no definition of “recovered.” The CDC says it’s the most worthless stat out there because we don’t know what the long term effects of the virus are. So how do we know if someone is fully recovered?
mommyatty, exactly. Some linger in the hospital for months, but they aren't dead, so they are "recovered"? Still, every time I read the percentages of deaths it is all over the place. I'm not sure that we are really know in the middle of the pandemic, maybe only at the end..