Data Without Doctoring Dr. David Owen
Beds and testing: Beds improving in Dade with general beds more available and ICU beds tight but improving. Broward remains tight for ICU (capacity easy to add, though) with general beds improving slightly. PBC absolutely no problem with 25-30% general and ICU bed availability consistently. Good news with the stability of beds in some counties and increasing availability in others, given the rise in cases. Testing remains very inaccurate although I cannot convince the media of this. Collection, the test itself, and now the reporting is all deficient. Add to that the severe underestimation of the actual incidence and you have a situation where the testing outside of high risk people and health care workers is virtually useless. Case in point, I have been tested twice and am negative. That apparently gets counted twice, which actually is fine. Remember all those who test positive once will subsequently test negative, and we need to know how many are now negative. Also recall for the thousands of positive tests we get each day, thousands more convert to covid negative, having had the disease already. Very confusing and therefore subject to reporting biases.
Deaths rose in the state by a meager (sorry to be so impersonal) 156, driven mainly by a record number of deaths in Dade, 44 (also meager given the close to 3 mill. pop!!). Overall bed availability has improved sl. in Dade which still remains elevated but with acceptable capacity available in both general and ICU beds. Broward which mysteriously still has not reported a death in 4 days, probably has sl. increased bed capacity but the county is almost full in terms of ICU beds (capacity easily obtainable though) and PBC outside of one hospital outlier (for many days), is in excellent shape for ICU and general beds and a low death number from yesterday, which is good. All in all not dire imo and with the increased deaths in Dade, the county is hurtling toward the low end HI estimate of 20% (now at 17.6%). Death rates continue to fall in the state and in the tri-county area with the rate in Broward and PBC really picking up for now.
As for the MSM...they are a hopeless case, continuing to harp on dirty test reporting data, of which virtually none is believable and at all representative of the extent of the pandemic. And you should see the grisly headlines!!! They have, in NYT fashion, failed to adequately characterize the pandemic with any degree of credibility, continuing to use worthless testing data as their surrogate for pandemic spread. Smart journalists would be focused laser-like on daily hospital reports, death rates, approaching HI issues and parsing out the antibody testing data from the dopey antigen tests which are inaccurate anyway. Very lazy reporting if ya ask me. The dopey asst professor/public health officials have stumbled across their prediction of 100 deaths per day in Florida, but had no clue the state would have over 1,785,000 at this time (most undetected by testing at this time) to generate this number.
Gives me agita, these people.
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