Just before Valentines Day, 2021 every county in Washington State had been granted the boon of advancing to the Governor’s Phase 2—except for the South Central region. After it was announced that the counties in that region would be held-back there was a general outcry, and miraculously, the current Governor’s office announced a “correction” on February 14th.
The problem, we are told, is that a single hospital (Providence St. Mary Medical Center) was misreporting their hospital admissions data and that messed-up the metrics. New numbers were submitted, and, presto, South Central opens up.
I’m happy for them. (Truly)
I also am troubled with the newly updated numbers that the Governor and Department of Health are releasing to explain it.
Someone is still not telling the complete truth.
A Simple Question To Ask
There is a very simple question that demonstrates that not all the information has been given to the public:
How long had Providence St. Mary Medical Center been reporting the wrong data?
Now, to start with I’m OK with someone saying they reported the wrong data. These things can be honest mistakes. But something is not right with the resulting numbers that the WA DOH has released to us.
Either, this hospital has been reporting the wrong data since at least the beginning of the Roadmap To Recovery plan; OR,
They somehow have been reporting it correctly all along and only made a mistake during the most recent cycle of examined dates.
It personally is hard to believe that the second of those two scenarios is true. If a hospital system has reporting procedures in place, and they have been correctly following them to provide the correct numbers for weeks or months on end, it is quite a stretch to ask people to believe that they somehow discovered their one-and-only mistake right when the current Governor most needed some relief from the pressure he was getting related to the South Central district. (I did send an email to the hospital asking for clarification, but I’ll be surprised if I get a reply from them.)
The much more plausible theory is the first one: that the hospital mistakenly has been using the wrong column of numbers all along to report to the state. Then when everyone realized that these wrong numbers were holding the district back they re-examined their processes and reported the correct numbers instead.
If the first scenario was true we’d expect to see the ‘updated’ numbers for the South Central region get modified for every reported Roadmap To Recovery time-period.
If the second were true, only the time-period for the most recent Phase 2 decision would be updated—but this would also require us to believe that a process has been error-free for months suddenly went sideways.
The data we have been given from the Governor does not clear this up for us.
Here’s the original data that they released, as captured on February 15th (after they announce the error, but before they released the updated data):
And here is the data they released the next day after they corrected the reporting error:
THAR = Trend in hospital Admission Rates.
Notice that in their “update” only one row has new numbers—row 3, which is the row containing the information that they used to determine phase advancement (or not). The original report showed (orange box) a +9% increase (bad, no phase for you), and the update showed a -19% decrease (good, enter into the joy of Phase 2). If you ONLY look at row 3 the math is technically correct.
However, it is impossible that only Row 3’s numbers can have changed.
Notice the red boxes in both reports show the previous period dates in row 3 are identical to the most-recent period dates in row 4. This should mean that the “count” for those periods are identical as well (blue boxes). While that is true for the original data (223 in both boxes) it is NOT true for the updated data (223 in one, 178 in another).
IF 178 is the correct number based on the discovered error (box M3), then box N4 ALSO has to be 173. They aren’t reporting that. But it also trickles down into the other data. If box N4 is 173, then that would change the percentage drop for that previous period as well. Box Q4 should have been updated to reflect a -44% drop instead of the already large -29% drop.
And since there was overlap in the counting periods back then (you will recall the governor changed that mid-stream), a change to N4 should also have some minor impact to the counts and percentages in row 5—but we see no change to ANY of these rows with the “corrected” data except for row 3.
Someone Isn’t Telling The Whole Truth
Again, I find it less-plausible that Providence St. Mary has been reporting correct data all-along but somehow managed to only make a mistake for data between 01/10 – 02/06. More likely they corrected ALL the data, but the current Governor’s office isn’t sharing that information, for who knows what reason.
Theories abound. Perhaps the Governor’s office relies on a lack of transparency as a rule. Perhaps he was getting lots of pressure because of his plan that has been rotten since the beginning, so he had a hospital “find” a mistake that could bail him out.
Perhaps it is “only” that the state is too lazy to be bothered with providing us with correct information. Either way, this is a problem and we all deserve better. We’re constantly told that the Washington Republic must continue to function as a dictatorship because of “data and science.” As you can clearly see above, even their own “corrected” data disagrees with itself.
How long are people going to stand for edicts from on-high in the name of “data” when those edicts are coming from someone who is either clearly being dishonest about the data, or else is too inept to get the data right?