July 16th 2020

By Mark Sumner

Daily Kos

In the middle of a massive pandemic seems the perfect time to revise the format in which states share information, reroute that information so it bypasses the CDC, and employ the National Guard to make sure that individual hospitals are entering the data “right.” If the latest White House scheme looks like a blatant effort to “solve” the pandemic by simply changing the data … well, yes. It does. With Donald Trump claiming that increases in cases are due to testing—please ignore the filling hospitals and growing deaths—putting the numbers in the hands of the White House is an invitation to turn the basic information of the crisis into the basis of propaganda.  

As far back as April, right-wing media was reporting that New York hospitals were exaggerating the number of cases and even accused healthcare locations of using mannequins to make it seem that emergency rooms and hospital beds were full. Hospitals were accused of exaggerating cases and of miscategorizing deaths to make COVID-19 seem more serious. Social media was peppered with videos of people breaking into ERs to “prove” they weren’t really that busy. Even before the epidemic exploded in the United States, sources on the right were insisting that COVID-19 was not as deadly as it seemed, not as widespread as people claimed, or not a thing at all. With Trump repeatedly using the word “hoax” to describe the pandemic, there are still people in the United States who don’t believe the coronavirus exists at all. And there are far more Trump followers ready to believe that the numbers of cases, and deaths, are being exaggerated.

If it seems impossible that a significant number of deaths from COVID-19 could be covered up in the United States, it takes no more than a quick review to see that this is already happening. Multiple states have rules that record only the specific cause of death for those who die in hospitals or have their deaths certified by a medical examiner. Early on in the U.S. epidemic this resulted in instances where hundreds of people who had died in nursing homes, or thousands who had died in their own homes, were not included in tallies. For the most part, these hidden deaths have been gradually added into the total, though not always smoothly. Reports have shown that, both around the world and in the United States, deaths from COVID-19 continue to be significantly undercounted. As early as April, investigators located over 9,000 deaths that had gone unrecorded.

There are also states like Florida which has already engaged in multiple steps designed to hide information and give Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis ultimate control of what the public sees. In April, Florida changed the process by which medical examiners report daily causes of death, taking what had been public information at the county level and creating a single list under the control of the state. This effort included threatening medical examiners who continued to release information by telling them they were in violation of “privacy laws.” In May, Florida fired the data scientist behind their state level information site after she complained that the state was hiding data, and DeSantis was accused of deliberately under-reporting cases in order to make his reopening plan seem more reasonable. When that data scientist created her own site in June, it showed that DeSantis was exaggerating the number of people tested by 400,000 and was hiding hospitalization information. In response, DeSantis claimed that the data scientist was under “criminal investigation” and that her data was “not valid.”

The disaster in Florida is, for the moment at least, so large that it’s become impossible to hide. But DeSantis certainly gave it a solid try. Maybe with Trump’s help …

The White House effort to gain control of coronavirus data looks suspicious because it is suspicious. The biggest problem for states reporting confirmed cases and deaths almost seven months into this epidemic remains a shortage of test materials, not data entry. While the invitation to have a National Guard member practicing military accountancy at every hospital may be voluntary, it’s almost certain to be taken up by red state governors in the states where the case counts are climbing most quickly. And even for the states that don’t go along, the bypassing of the CDC is going to happen anyway. HHS has built a new data hotel. All the data flows in … and what happens next is entirely up to Trump.

Posted with permission