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WPCNR QUARTERLY STATE OF LIFE SERIES # 4. News & Comment By John F. Bailey. March 27, 2023:
I am writing this after the Friday White Plains Week report.
When I finished that report and was having cocktail hour with Brenda Starr, she mentioned a covid article on page 2 of the morning New York Times how the paper are changing the way they report the numbers on covid.
Their reason, I quote:
“The New York Times is ending its Covid data gathering operation. The Times will continue to publish its Covid tracking pages for the United States, only now they will be based on the latest information available from the federal government, not The Times’s data set.”
The Times remarks they will concentrate on hospitalizations, deaths from the virus, but will update them weekly, not daily. The Times also states “the data from state and local sources is reported less frequently and less reliably. The comprehensive, real-time reporting that the Times hjas prioritized is no longer possible.”
I applaud this effort to concentrate on hospitalizations to gauge the ongoing impact of this disease.
Hospitalizations have been played down in information in Westchester County and the Mud-Hudson region. And unless you have the patience of a season dataset analyst using the New York State Department of Health daily record of hospitalizations that shows what hospitals are getting hit with hospitalizations, you do not get a true picture of the chilling amount of persons being hospitalized for covid the last 2 and 1/2 months
White Plains Hospital Medical Center in the last 3 weeks back to March 1 shows that since march is a go-to place for many covid sufferers 58% of admissions to White Plains hospital beds are for Covid. Through the 21st of March there were 172 persons admitted to White Plains Hospital and 102 were being treated for covid. These were not Emergency Room walk-ins and walkouts after treatment . Other hospitals around Westchester are not experiencing this consistent stream of Covid traffic.
The Times decision to drill deeper into hospitalizations around counties and their hospitals is a good one.
However when this new policy of once a week data desemination from the Center for Disease Control which has declared ambiguous messages in the past, and now we are going to get less of it from the CDC? How does that improve matters?
The government data mills grind out economic indicators weekly. One week it is up and one week they are down and the government, Wall Street, consumers moan. Politicians claim we must do something.
Meanwhile as the Times observes in Covid there is a deterioration of time on-the-money data.
When facts fail to be considered important by bureaucrats of large agencies, there is a tendency to dilute the value of facts.
The Times is troubled by this deterioration of quality timely Covid data. So is the noted epidemiologist, Dr. Katelyn Jetelina whose news letter has opened my eyes to a lot of not is not being interelated when the should be.
I have long decried Westchester County suspending the county community by community daily infections map When they did that about 6 months it was a real loss because the media lost a measuring tool that at the time it was suspended was showing all communities in county with daily new cases of the disease. We had that and now we don’t
The evil that creates situations is the tendency to portray matters in a positive manner, particularly if you are governing them. Happy economy, happy recreation, there’s no security problems –those positives keep the people from panicking or being conservative in their contributions to society: keeping the economy going by spending comes to mind. Covid killed us for 3 years. Now we may be letting it back in by not paying attention enough to what it is doing.
The hospitalizations data for the facilities in Westchester New York City, Nassau and Suffolk and the Mid-Hudson region is very revealing.
On March 21, the 7 counties in the Mid Hudson Region was 104 in one day which is 3,126 possible cases hospitalized in a month from now.
What is needed is knowledge on how hospital staffs are being impacted. Are nurses leaving in droves. Are doctors retiring. Is there a shortage of medicine to treat covid? The people in our 7 counties in the Hudson region are getting sick with covid. How are the logistics of treating holding up and of course who is getting it.
School reporting on their positive covid cases is a must. Schools must be more candid on their illness management and extend of it. Last year White Plains Hospital had 25% of students, teachers, administrations come down with covid. We have no idea of that now.
That is just making it easy to hide, if you want to hide, how the schools, businesses and the people in those venues what the covid situation and hoping it all blow over.
Today the state of evil is willfully ignoring reality.