Texas' count of coronavirus deaths jumps 12% after officials change the way they tally COVID-19 fata
Source: Texas Tribune /raw story
Texas' count of coronavirus deaths jumps 12% after officials change the way they tally COVID-19 fatalities
Hispanic Texans are overrepresented in the state's updated fatality count, making up 47% of deaths, but only 40% of the state's population.
by Edgar Walters July 27, 2020 Updated: 2 hours ago
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After months of undercounting coronavirus deaths, Texas formal tally of COVID-19 fatalities grew by more than 600 on Monday after state health officials changed their method of reporting.
The revised count indicates that more than 12% of the states death tally was unreported by state health officials before Monday.
The Texas Department of State Health Services is now counting deaths marked on death certificates as caused by COVID-19. Previously, the state relied on local and regional public health departments to verify and report deaths...........................................................................
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Nurses look over the X-rays of coronavirus patients in the COVID-19 unit at the DHR Health Center in Edinburg. Photo credit:
Miguel Gutierrez Jr./The Texas Tribune
Major Nikon
(36,814 posts)Who could have ever seen that one coming?
Laelth
(32,017 posts)Most of the Texans I meet in my part of the state believe that the gubmint is actually overstating the numbers.
-Laelth
Stallion
(6,473 posts)Is it that hard? Really?
-Laelth
justgamma
(3,660 posts)said they were counting all deaths as covid deaths? I was told that they were over reporting deaths so they said.
oldsoftie
(12,410 posts)Any news like that gets big coverage on the Right.
PA did it earlier; cutting counts by a few hundred. I dont know the full reason why though
BumRushDaShow
(127,320 posts)they have "County Coroners" or "County Medical Examiners" and it became both an issue of jurisdictional responsibility for reporting (the Coroners/MEs usually acted independently under state regulations because they covered all types of deaths - homicides, suicides, overdoses, disease, etc).
So you had both hospitals and other medical/long term care facilities reporting AND Coroners/MEs also reporting to the state, and those numbers were not matching. I.e., what became a discrepancy of "confirmed" vs "probable" (meaning "tested and confirmed" vs "suspected due to the exposure tracing/symptoms/care", but lacking a confirmatory test at the time of the report). The Coroners/MEs have to do an "investigation" and that takes time (and with the exponential rises, a huge backlog occurred), so it would be difficult to get up-to-date fatality numbers.
Many of the removed "probables" did eventually get added back at a later date once confirmed by testing and that is how they are doing them now. Both sets of data were reported in different systems and had been combined but then they revised that process to be consistent with reporting only "confirmed" (but still have the "suspected" data being collected and moved to "confirmed" once results come through).
What the state did back then was to initially keep them separate, but then start to include probables when people were complaining that the state was "missing many coronavirus deaths"... But then the pendulum swung the other way and the opposite type of complaints started about deaths that were not confirmed by the Coroners/MEs (via the death certificates showing the "cause" ), so they pulled those without a death certificate okayed by the Coroners/MEs.
In some cases, you had people who had died at home or even out in the streets and they sat in the morgue or refrigerated trucks for quite some time, and others who were taken by their families and buried/cremated without any autopsy. They were eventually able to get a better process in place.
This mirrored the early data reporting issues nationwide where there was a difference between a "confirmed positive" (which required actual CDC lab confirmation) and a "presumptive positive" (where a CDC lab hadn't done the confirmation of the test yet). That was eventually resolved with "presumptive positives" by local/state/private labs accepted as "confirmed positive" and included in the counts.