They say that information is power and that’s no doubt the hope of state health officials who announced on Friday, Nov. 20 that the state was expanding the demographic data it reports on North Carolina COVID-19 cases.
With new weekly summaries, demographic data for COVID-19 cases per 100,000 residents and total deaths by week are now available broken down by age group, gender, race and ethnicity for the state.
The new weekly information will be updated every Monday.
In another addition, demographic data on deaths is now available by county.
The new information will be displayed on the “Case Demographics” page of the state’s COVID-19 “Dashboard” – a web-based information tool the state created earlier this year to provide constant up-to-date data on the pandemic.
As of noon on Friday, Nov. 20, North Carolina had seen a total of 328,846 coronavirus cases since the state started counting in March – and, at that time, 1,571 people were hospitalized in the state for COVID-19.
According to a November 20 press release announcing the new data breakdown, the demographic information won’t be available in every case since, at times, people can’t be reached by authorities and, in other cases, a person may choose not to disclose the information.
“Because demographic data are often obtained through case investigations by local health departments, there can be a lag in when the data are available,” the press release states. “Therefore, data displayed for the most recent two-week period are often incomplete.”
The data may also be incomplete when a county has a population of fewer than 500 individuals for a specific demographic group – or fewer than three cases occurring in a week – because some data is suppressed to protect patient privacy.
Notice anything unusual? Is it just me or do we seem to have some miraculous new way to “refine” the data every couple of weeks to make it lean toward whatever is needed in order to secure the latest greatest grant funding dollars? Gotta love it! Yes, people are getting sick, yes, it is real, yes, it will get worse before it gets better, yes, we’re all getting screwed in the process. I believe it was President Ronald Reagan who once said some of the scariest words in the English language were “We’re from the government and we’re here to help.” Those words have never been as scary as they are today!
Right! They gotta do something to satisfy their phoney-bahloney jobs.
I’d like to see them show deaths related to heart issues and cancer. Might help put The Dreaded Wuhan Virus in a more balanced perspective. Living. . . is not safe.
It would be interesting to know how many people are dying per month per 100,000 population as opposed to how many died in the same time period in previous years. Are more people dying, or are they just dying from different causes? Or is is just that the causes and numbers are being reported differently?