The current Governor of Washington, Jay Inslee, continues to play fast and loose with the term “data” and “science.” In our most recent example, yesterday he announced he was graciously letting the data determine a move to Phase 2 of every district except for the South Central region.
We were told to be happy about this and that South Central was not reopening largely because of their own actions. They need to throw less parties and things. If you would like to suffer through the entire press conference it is here:
https://www.tvw.org/watch/?clientID=9375922947&eventID=2021021287&autoStartStream=true
So what of these slackers in the South Central region? Do they deserve to stay closed like the Governor claims? I’ve long since documented that Inslee’s metrics make for bad math. They ignore (punish even) any gains made in previous weeks by focusing too much on an artificial bar for short-term improvement.
That is outlined more completely here (and a letter signed by multiple legislators was sent to the Governor weeks ago objecting to this dynamic):
South Central region is being punished this week by precisely the situation described in that article. Unlike the Governor (who talks a lot about data but doesn’t appear to actually look at it) we will show this in WA’s own published numbers. If you want to check my work behind me,
I’m getting my info from:
https://coronavirus.wa.gov/what-you-need-know/roadmap-recovery-metrics
South Central region is being held back because they only met 2 of the 4 metrics. It is particularly the +9% trend in hospital admission rate that is a problem for any rational thinker:
Funny thing about colorful grids is you can use them to hide all kinds of actual info. Let’s look at the actual numbers for the South Central hospitalization rate trends.
I had to truncate the column titles to fit the numbers in, but here’s the explanation.
The blue box (365) is where that district’s count was when Inslee first announced his latest “plan.”
The red box (242) is the count released today (Feb 12).
You can clearly see that South Central region’s hospital admissions rate is down 34% from where it started. This is still not “good enough” because the Governor’s plan (as I called out in early January) ignores and punishes past improvement.
Take a look at the purple boxes. South Central district had decreases of -22%, -36%, and -29% in consecutive weeks! But the Governor’s plan ignores these and ignores the overall improvement and only uses short-term memory to make freedom crushing decisions.
Perhaps, you might wonder, the South Central district is still in trouble with their hospitals even despite the large overall drop? Nope. Look again at the ICU capacity metric (probably the only one out of the 4 that actually makes sense) as compared to Puget Sound.
Their actual ICU capacities are nearly identical (85% vs 86%).
The only difference between the two regions’ hospital-related metrics is that the South Central region had significant improvement early on (which was subsequently ignored by the Governor’s plan) whereas the Puget Sound region was lucky enough to have a steady decrease at a less drastic rate than the South Central region.
In other words, South Central region is not moving to Phase 2 with the rest of the state specifically because they improved too quickly early on.
If only they had been smart or lucky enough to slow down their improvements, they’d be open right now too. (Oh, adding insult to injury, the Puget Sound region only dropped a total of 15% on the hospitalizations rate metric since this plan was announced as opposed to South Central’s 34%.)
Governor Inslee wants to pretend that even though he is the one making the rules, that somehow this is all on autopilot and out of his hands. That is ridiculous. These are his nonsensical metrics that are resulting in illogical restrictions. He owns this sorry excuse for a plan, regardless of how many times he uses the “data and science” mantra. People in the South Central district should rightfully be livid that they are still held back because of a poorly-designed plan.
Even more than that, Inslee has indicated that there IS no Phase 3 and that he can’t even give an estimate on when he will start thinking about it. (See the formerly mentioned press conference where he confirmed that twice.)
With the Governor demonstrating weekly that his plan is a farce, will Washington really wait around for him to grant us the favor of moving on to other Phases?
How will we know that his next plan to move us ahead again won’t be as ridiculous as this one has been?
Why do we even believe that “phases” are somehow needed at this point at all?
More to the point, how long will our Washington legislators stand idly by (with the exception of a few) and allow a single person to use arbitrary rules to hold us back? The Washington judiciary has already signaled that it has no interest in safeguarding our freedoms. The executive branch is off the rails and thinks that by saying “data and science” over and over it makes his rules better.
All we have left is the legislature. When are they going to put an end to our two-weeks-to-flatten-the-curve?
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