FWIW, I submitted that thread which is sourced to CBS12, because I had thought (mistakenly [0]) that it would be more accessible to EU users. However, the CBS12 story is essentially a summation of the floridatoday.com story, with some additional followup comment from the fired scientist.
I think I've got a good guess what data she didn't want removed or changed, and it's not exactly good for her case. On May the 5th, they day she was removed from her position, there was an all-time high spike of 113 reported coronavirus deaths due to Florida reporting a bunch of old deaths all at once: https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/2020/05/15/florida-adds...
This did not represent an actual spike in deaths which had in reality been declining, but if I remember rightly some people did spin it as deaths increasing due to the lockdown being lifted. Deaths by date reported are conspicuously missing from the current version of the dashboard; it only has dates by date of death, which is far less favourable to the claim that lifting the lockdown is causing an increase in deaths.
Let me enumerate the doubts I have about makomk's speculative guess.
1. The linked article in the comment reflects a clear understanding of the lag between occurrence and report dates, which points to the dashboard not having been in any kind of misleading state.
2. Even when a lot of politics is being played, it does not seem plausible that people were spinning deaths reported May 5 as being due to the May 4 reopening.
3. The "in reality had been declining" part fails to acknowledge the way reporting by occurrence date always makes graphs have a decline at the end (see rovolo's comment, sibling to mine)
Even if the data was misreported, which is a possibility, censoring or deleting it in some way is the worst option. Lets say Florid's growth for that month was 30%. But because of bad reporting it thought it had a growth rate of 15%, until the end of the month when all of the missed cases were reported. That spike will not be accurate, but just deleting it would make it look like Florida still had a 15% growth rate. Reviewing the full months data to correct those issues would give the clearest report, but reporting the raw data is more honest than just deleting the anomaly.
The trade off is between measurement bias and selection bias. Typically you want to be dealing with measurement bias and not selection bias, since the latter is often impossible to account for.
You are correct that it is preferable to report the raw data, but it is more than just "honest"! Even with that data `incorrectly` on the wrong day, when binned as a full month the growth rate will be correct. That is, the data is now more correct than if the late reported deaths were not included.
> "it does not seem plausible that people were spinning deaths reported May 5 as being due to the May 4 reopening."
You've got to be kidding. Here on Hacker News people were buying the very same sort of spin from an article about the 1918 flu epidemic and San Francisco (I think that was the city). I've seen lots of people on either "side" of this issue buy into absolutely outrageous claims that are clearly just spin.
For example, weeks ago somebody on the "open up now" side graphed the data from the CDC showing that deaths around the country weren't increasing, but in fact plummeting. The page with the data is explicit in multiple places that the data is incomplete for many weeks into the past. Then, weeks later I heard that the official death toll from Covid-19 had been cut by 50%. When I asked for a source, it was that same page with data that lags by up to 8 weeks.
Another example: somebody on the "panic now" side reported (in the news, IIRC) that Michigan's positive test ratio was skyrocketing and had reached 47%. The only table that contained positive vs negative test results clearly had not been reporting the negative tests at all. They should have just gone ahead and claimed that 100% of the tests in MI were positive, since that was what the table showed for the previous 5 days.
The fake news around Covid-19 has been driving me absolutely crazy on both sides.
But I didn’t call it that. I called lying about what was happening in MI in order to make people think things were way worse than they really are, the “panic now” side.
Do you not agree that such lies are bad? Perhaps you think the end justifies the means, but in that case, you might want to consider what telling lies does to the public’s perception of your trustworthiness when you tell them it’s necessary to stay in lockdown.
And then there’s all the real reasons not to panic. Because hoarding is bad for everybody. Because failing to seek necessary medical care for your ruptured appendix because you’re afraid of getting Covid-19 as a 28-year old would be pretty bad. And on and on.
What possible good do the lies I described above accomplish?
It does not seem plausible that reasonable people would suggest suppressing data just because some people tried to spin deaths reported May 5 as being due to the May 4 reopening.
If information sources in either of the examples you gave were later suppressed due to the extreme spin put on them, please let me know.
For the curious: Michigan's positive test rate on 19May2020 was: 435 new cases/12726 tests = 0.034, or 3.4%. Which is pretty good and means they are finding most cases within the section of the community they are testing.
For comparison, Australian testing rates (some of the best in the world) are around 0.5% to 1% in the week after the peak of cases.
Using date-of-death based statistics does indeed cause a misleading drop-off in the last few days - there's no perfect way of reporting uncertain information like this in real time - and I should probably have noted that, yeah, but the decline was longer term than that. Though in any case, it looks like my guess was wrong and the problem with Florida stats was even more embarrassing than that. Like, I'd assume if the supposed data manipulation had to do with drumming up support for reopening it'd have some relevance to what was happening now...
Massachusetts (where I live) just retroactively restated their case and death data by test/death date vs. reporting date so it more closely aligns to when a person was experiencing sickness or death. I find it far more useful now. The curve is now smoother, and you can see just how lumpy reporting timing was making daily releases of numbers. It has the knock on effect of making the numbers for the last seven or so days liable to change every day, but it’s still a better picture of what’s going on. This should be the norm.
Colorado includes all of this information. It is useful to see it in different ways. But I have definitely found the deaths-by-date-of-death to be the most useful (it is also the most encouraging).
> I have definitely found the deaths-by-date-of-death to be the most useful
Tracking deaths is actually the worst, most lagging indicator. It takes a very long time to die.
The most useful was the CDC tracking cases-by-illness-onset, that gave you a great understanding of what the trend line really looked like over the last couple of days.
All indicators have pros and cons. Deaths by date of death is the most lagging indicator, which is bad for in-the-moment decision making, but it is also the most direct measure of the thing we should care most about, minimizing death-causing infections. So you can look at a graph of deaths by date, and if it is way down (like it is in Colorado right now), then you know that things were going well over the last few weeks. This doesn't give us any data on how well we're doing now, during our partial re-opening, but it will give us that information over the next few weeks, in a way that we can compare with what we were doing over the last few weeks.
Cases by onset date is pretty good too, but there is this period of some unknown number of days where it is misleading because it is too incomplete. The Colorado tracker shades ten days as "potentially unreported cases", but I always wonder how they chose ten and whether that's conservative or aggressive. The death by date of death has the benefit of not being incomplete in that way. Another problem I see with cases by onset date is that I don't really care that much about how many cases there are, not directly. If there were a huge number of cases, but no deaths, that would be a bummer because being sick sucks, but it would not justify our extreme reaction. What we care about are the deaths. So I like direct measures of that.
Cases by reported date doesn't seem very useful at all, for anything. Percent positive tests by day is a similar measure that seems more useful.
But I'm an amateur, this is just what I think is and isn't useful for reasoning about what's going on.
That's called an 'epi curve' and it's a very common thing, but the data usually lags somewhat.
'Date of reporting of case' and 'date of onset of symptoms' are two different things, both useful.
The epi curve has the problem that it always looks like cases are declining because the most recent few days are 'not filled in yet' by cases that have been reported.
I don't think it's anti-scientific to report either way, so long as the dats is well represented.
If you have been following daily reported death "headlines" for MA, it doesn't line up with the state's per-day graphs; see page 9 [0]. I assume they're investigating them and going back and updating the daily totals as the graph seems to lag a few days, but it's not clear to me what methodology they are using. They have been doing this for a while.
Please don't copy-paste comments on HN, and especially not someone else's. Copying lowers signal/noise and makes thread merging a nightmare, since we end up with duplicates.
If you want to reference what someone else (or you yourself) already posted, please do so with a link. Adding info about why you're linking to it is also welcome.
Edit: Actually it would be fine to quote from what you're linking to as well. This did lead to good discussion and I don't mean to interfere with that!
It is transparent, and you can find in official sources what is counted and what is not. But just looking at the global statistics, it is hard to know what's going on. We even have people "resurrecting".
The biggest reason for all this mess is that we combine data sources with different levels of reliability.
- Many things go unreported on week-ends and holidays. So we often see artificial spikes on Mondays, and Tuesdays.
- Hospital deaths are reliable but incomplete, and taken by themselves, with week-ends smoothed out, you see a rather smooth curve that makes sense.
- EMS/EHPAD (nursing homes) deaths are less reliable. Patients dying while showing symptoms are considered COVID-19 victims, even if not tested. It can be reverted at a later date. Reporting can take more time, and in fact wasn't considered at all during early statistics.
- People dying at home are not counted at all, too difficult to keep track of. We do have global mortality stats for all causes though.
- During the peak of the pandemic the testing policy was to test only if necessary for the health of the patient or medical personnel, not for statistical reasons. It means a lot of underreporting.
That's a common problem. I spent a while contracting with an insurance company a decade or so ago, and one of my fellow developers was tasked with coding an "un-decease person" feature. It was non-trivial.
I think that using date-of-report is better for lay-people. Pro/cons:
- There's a one time spike when the methodology changes
= The data lags reality on the ground (true for both date-of-report and date-of-death)
+ Past dates aren't updated, so there isn't a continuous bias to show a slowdown in the number of new deaths
I think that the last point is the most important because it's super easy for people to misinterpret provisional data. People were talking about covid-19 not causing excess mortality because using date-of-death always shows a dip for the present: https://twitter.com/TylerMorganMe/status/1248452375162925057
> Another very surprising thing is to see no excess mortality in Sweden, a country criticized for a laxer strategy against COVID-19. I was not expecting to see that.
That was week 14 for https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ . In fact, week 14's excess death z-score for Sweden was in the "very high excess" category after the data was collected.
There is a third option here. Don't publish data until it's collected. This means you don't publish data for deaths on a date until all the deaths on that date have been reported. Then you don't have to retroactively update anything because you didn't publish numbers before they're finalized.
This option is clearly better than publishing date of report as date of death, because doing that is inaccurate. The data is really from events a week or more ago when you think it's from today, and you can get clusters like this when many reports come in at once.
The disadvantage is that you then have newer data that isn't being published because it isn't completely in yet. But if you are going to publish incomplete data then it should still be date of death and the dates without full reporting should be annotated so that people understand that they're looking at incomplete data -- which they are, so it's very important for that to be understood.
It's a sliding scale between immediacy and accuracy, with a very high upper length of time for perfect accuracy. I work with death record statistics for a state government, and our reports use data from 2 years ago. A big reason is gathering reports for residents who died in other states.
I know the CDC has a good system for sharing infectious disease diagnoses (https://wwwn.cdc.gov/nndss). I don't know if there's a similar rapid-collection system for death records. We usually don't need to track deaths with this urgency.
A possible compromise is to model a delayed reporting factor. Not sure if there could be a good enough model, though.
> don't publish data for deaths on a date until all the deaths on that date have been reported
Based on the animation I linked, it takes around 15 weeks for an apparent decrease in pneumonia deaths to rise to a normal number. 15 weeks ago was Feb 4. (Granted, pneumonia death data collection in normal times will be different than covid-specific data now). The numbers do get more accurate with time though. There is a trade-off between accuracy and timeliness.
Lay-people don’t really dig into the data and don’t compare i dates for changing stats. Tracking deaths by date of occurrence is much more useful than date of report, even if it means that you have to restate figures sometimes. We see that happen a lot with economic figures where they restart the previous month or quarter’s stats.
Restating the figures isn't necessarily bad. The issue with mortality revisions is that they're always revised upward; whereas the economic revisions can go either way.
Using date-of-death introduces a consistent bias where recent deaths are undercounted compared to earlier deaths. People care about whether deaths are currently slowing or increasing. Date-of-report may be inaccurate, but it doesn't bias the trajectory of deaths consistently in either direction.
* They stopped graphing the per country raw numbers, which makes it impossible to put things in perspective: what is the comparative excess mortality per million people?
* They use deceptive graphs that do not start yaxis at zero
* They refuse to publish the raw dataset for independent processing.
"One day before a top Florida Department of Health data manager lost her role maintaining the state’s COVID-19 data, she objected to the removal of records showing people had symptoms or positive tests before the cases were announced, according to internal emails obtained by the Tampa Bay Times."
So I guess "makomk" was wrong. And your admiration for his baseless speculation was also wrong.
I wonder what percentage of all HN posts, almost none of which receive such honours as being reposted by an admirer, manage this sort of trifecta of missing its prediction, never actually having a meaningful argument or mechanism for the prediction, and, by its own admission, smearing the person concerned with these unsubstantiated claims of lying and/or at least acting in bad faith.
lockdown has had no effect on cases/deaths. just look at the data in germany or other countries which have lifted lockdown since 4 weeks. no difference.
>An epidemiologist, Dr. Carina Blackmore, was the one who contacted the IT director to make the change. Then the IT director contacted Rebekah Jones to actually implement the change and she threw a fit. There is nothing to suggest Dr. Blackmore is political or wanted to support reopening.
>What Dr. Blackmore asked to be removed was a count of unconfirmed cases based on self-reported symptoms. They only wanted confirmed cases represented.
Who is making the claim that she 'threw a fit'? The redditor? That's patronizing, not something that helps me understand the nature of the disagreement, and not something that makes me think any attempt is being made at a charitable attempt to understand her actions.
Charity goes both ways. Jones hasn’t reported more details than this, so to attack reports that don’t align with hers based on inaccurate language while supporting her complete lack of details seems dishonest. And come on, we both know what a developer throwing a fit means.
>And come on, we both know what a developer throwing a fit means.
No, I really don't. Tell me. Did she yell? Knock over a computer? What did she do? And then tell me which line of which news article supports that as a fair and charitable characterization. I don't know where that is coming from other than a commenter just asserting it. Meanwhile, as far as you are concerned, as long as you can close your eyes and picture what the fictional description of 'throwing a fit' looks like, that, rather than factual accuracy, is enough for you to accept the description.
And I don't see how 'charity goes both ways' has anything to do with anything, insofar as it's relevant to the characterization of Jones. It's not an answer or justification, it's a smoking crater of nothingness. Do you have anything else?
I, and I imagine many others, immediately jumped to the conclusion that the data in question was more concrete, like confirmed cases or ICU counts. It goes to show how easily twists can be put on any story to serve a larger purpose
the data in question was more concrete, like confirmed cases or ICU counts
There's been been accusations of government manipulation of perceived infection rates through under testing. More concrete data is arguably only an improvement if sufficient testing is being conducted.
I think the goal should be the most concrete data we have.
A debate could be had on if self reporting or test data is more accurate. One factor to consider is if the self reporting data is being represented in a way commonly reserved for test data. Another factor to consider is that 33% of Americans think they may have had covid and 13% think they probably did [1]. This is grossly out of agreement with serology results.
In this case, the media was using the self reporting data to claim that Florida had Covid-19 cases as early as December (and it's this that Florida was supposedly firing her for refusing to cover up): https://www.miamiherald.com/news/state/florida/article242480... Needless to say, people self-reporting Covid-19 symptoms that early is the most unreliable self-reporting data of all due to the low or maybe even zero number of genuine cases and the much larger prevalence of things like the flu. If I remember rightly, researchers have tried serology tests on people who thought they had it that early and found that basically none of them had.
But under testing has had the opposite effect of what you seem to be applying; it doesn't make the disease perceived as less dangerous, it makes the disease look much more severe by undercounting the mild cases.
Undertesting might make the severe cases look more dangerous, but the media focus right now is "flattening the curve". By under-reporting the number of active cases, politicians can push for earlier reopening.
The risk is that untested asymptomatic or presymptomatic cases can then exponentially spread back through the community.
I do wholeheartedly agree with a sibling comment that self-reported data should be clearly separated from actual confirmed cases.
While I don't disagree that we need more information, basically the only person that is qualified to suggest what was asked to be changed is the person fired, so if you don't take her word for it, then the state of Florida officials that want to bury this, are going to win.
>basically the only person that is qualified to suggest what was asked to be changed is the person fired
What? By this logic, it would be virtually impossible to fire anyone who was willing to lie about what was said behind closed doors. Not saying the person in the article is lying, but I hope we haven't devolved to a state where individuals can make claims about wrongful termination and just automatically be assumed to be telling the truth. We have courts of law and discovery processes and things like that.
I agree that considered judgement is desirable, but it seems that the recent surge in so-called 'cancel culture' has put an end to thoughfulness and patience.
You hopefully do realize that obviously in case of wrongful termination the state has incentive to cover it up. And... She's the only person fighting on her side and no lawyer has incentive to take a potentially losing battle against order of magnitude bigger opponent.
99.999% (some huge number of 9's) of people are never punished for lying in court.
I asked the lawyer in a case we have what the consequences were for the other side getting caught lying to the judge... he just laughed. Nothing ever happens.
I have two FOIA requests pending with the Federal government, going on a year now. I have no idea what Florida's equivalent is like, but I suspect this story will be long forgotten by the time that produces a result.
The most effective response is for the media to make a big deal about the possibility of censorship in the short term, and demand transparency from the state. If the state feels that their position is being misrepresented and there's no wrongdoing, they can make a public statement and correct the record.
This is why “Florida man <does something insane>” is a meme; the sunshine laws result in police reports being made public in Florida in time to produce articles of this form.
Police reports are automatically public but almost everything else is public. I had to request it for a documentary on Cybersecurity that went nowhere and got a lot of interesting info about state spending.
I wonder how many FOIA requests turn up useful information. I've heard horror stories of people becoming victims of targeted harassment from agencies they attempted to get of FOIA request from.
This is bad reasoning. This is equivalent to someone claiming "I was fired because I found evidence of Martians mind-controlling the President" and then you responding with "if you don't take her word for it, then The Illuminati, who want to bury this story, are going to win!"
Sorry, evidence doesn't work that way, neither does good reasoning
I mean, this is the same state where the governor ordered coroners to not disclose nursing home death counts, so I'm not sure why we need a particularly high bar to believe this lady's story.
They were (are?) also not counting deaths by visitors from out-of-state.
Even the likes of Belarus, Saudi Arabia, Iran, China, or Brazil seem to have realised either that it's better for them to be transparent, or that fudging the numbers is always going to come out in the end.
I'm somewhat certain such shenanigans are magnitudes worse for a state's image. New York is seen as unlucky, or maybe incompetent. Florida is corrupt. A failed state.
Florida has a lot of out of staters, too; a million elderly folks come for the winter and typically wouldn’t be counted as residents. They’re also the demographic that dies at very elevated rates.
Deaths are not reported based on residency - Deaths are reported based on the actual location of death. If the death occurs in Florida, it counts as a Florida Death as per CDC / NCHS.
> What’s more, the health department has said it is only including Florida residents in its count, although after the Times’ report it began posting some data on non-resident deaths in feeds online.
> “By their own admission, they are not counting every Florida death,” Nelson said. “I’m surprised that they are ahead.”
This article has a bit more detail, particularly on her email to users. It reads a bit like "I am virtuous, my bosses are scoundrels, and you should expect my successors to be liars".
It's possible that there really is fire here, but that's a textbook example of how not to blow the whistle and be seen as credible.
>It's possible that there really is fire here, but that's a textbook example of how not to blow the whistle and be seen as credible.
For some reason, this statement strikes me as being cruel to someone who is willing to take a stand on moral principles. For someone to buck the orders, it takes a lot of courage and be able to stand up under pressure. There are no textbook examples of how to whistleblow and I think we owe these people who are willing to call out problems as they see it a more charitable hearing.
Maybe its the morality of society in general or maybe its the Trump effect but I think we have been too quick to assign hero status and moral uprightness to people at the slightest opportunity. I'm not calling this woman a liar but as long as I can imagine a plausible scenario that provides an alternative explanation to whatever has been claimed especially considering that I dont know this person personally, I think I for one will not be so hasty with the canonization.
> I think we owe these people who are willing to call out problems as they see it a more charitable hearing.
In general, whistleblowers should be attended to, due consideration should be given to what they are risking.
But if you're going to do it, you need to build up a case and make it carefully and dispassionately, and above all maintain your professionalism. This reads more like a divorce proceeding.
If you're going to be dispassionate, you'll never whistle blow - nobody weighing the pros/cons dispassionately would consider ruining their career to expose one of the millions of shit companies a worthwhile endeavour.
Problem is "someone who is willing to take a stand on moral principles" looks the same as "someone who was caught with their hand in the cookie jar and claims to be a victim".
One big problem is the timing of all of this. In a typical government job, you could stab a co-worker to death, and management will sit around for three months mulling what to do about it.
In this case, it sounds like they told her to make a change, she said she disagreed but made the change anyway. And then they fired her? For what? This just doesn't ring true.
The coverup idea doesn't make much sense either. Apparently the "deleted" data was minor detail that would be published in a day or two anyway. Is it even material? Would anyone even be looking at it, aside from this scandal? Also sounds off.
My guess is that (right or wrong), she was already on someone's shitlist, and this was the last straw. The "my successors will be liars" thing certainly wouldn't make me want to work with her.
There will be an investigation, as there should be. I suspect there's little or no fire.
I actually agree with the beginning part of your comment, but then it makes much more sense to me that she was fired for political reasons. Pissing someone off or making them look bad is one of the few ways I see a fast firing happening in government these days.
One thing to add to that is that: Yes, it may be political, but it may be a very localized political situation (like a coworker or a PM or just this person's boss). The media/news/articles/discussion appear to be portraying this event in such a way as to portray the local governor/state-government in a bad light and as somehow responsible. See all the talk about the governor in this thread, the orders about nursing homes, etc.
"that's a textbook example of how not to blow the whistle and be seen as credible."
Considering that the last 2 years is full of whistle blowers that acted credibly and saw nothing happen, I doubt she cared about the larger optics. The data manger was probably more concerned with an immediate, clear response to users of the data.
Is the quote below the one you're describing? It's strongly worded, but I don't see how it would hurt her ability to be seen as credible.
“As a word of caution, I would not expect the new team to continue the same level of accessibility and transparency that I made central to the process during the first two months. After all, my commitment to both is largely (arguably entirely) the reason I am no longer managing it,” she wrote.
Yeah, I'm already seeing reports from other sources that the Florida data is now harder to access -- data going missing or unavailable for download, site crashing [1]. That would tend to support her remarks.
A spokesperson for the health department’s Hillsborough County office said a lag in reporting accounts for some of the difference. The health department is also excluding some snowbirds and other seasonal residents, along with visitors who died in Florida, from its count. The medical examiners are including anyone who died in Florida.
They stopped counting snowbirds cause that made the counts go down magically. Just like when the state prohibited medical examiners from giving results out (which is unprecedented in Florida). It's very clear they are going step by step to hide the true death count.
I just downloaded the entire dataset. All the same data seems to be there. Confusingly, this includes the "EventDate" field that she had been asked to remove.
It reads to me like a person who believes they have integrity. I'd willingly hire and seek opportunities to work with people who value their integrity.
She's publicly asserting that one or more of her colleagues will lie when they take over her role. She literally cannot predict the future behavior of these people, and is thus acting in bad faith.
Life is short, and I don't get paid enough to deal with people like that.
Where, specifically, does she assert that they will lie? She says they won’t be as transparent and she says they won’t be as accessible. Neither of those are accusations of an intent to lie.
And for what it’s worth, both of those accusations seem to have already played out as she expected. You can read more in comments in this thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23239014
Typically by virtue of being a whistleblower, you're throwing your career under the bus. That alone lends you more credibility, especially when you hold a position like she did.
Plus as someone else said, there have been plenty of whistleblowers this election cycle, all of whom were immediately claimed as being disgruntled workers, partisans etc no matter how professionally they tried to handle it. At a certain point we really need to start putting the burden of proof on the state and governmental agencies rather than playing defense for them.
"? I find her statement pretty obvious and candid"
It's neither obvious nor candid if it is in fact misrepresentative.
To me it looks terrible. She was fired for doing something wrong and she's claiming that 'only she has the ability to do it well, the newcomers cannot' which is definitely problematic.
Given the details of what she was asked to do and did not do so ... I don't see the state acting in any way towards 'censoring' information, just a disagreement as to what and how information should be presented.
Trump is claiming that Flynn was 'unmasked' and that this was some kind of crime, when in fact Obama letting Trump know that Flynn is under investigation was exactly what we want him to do.
The state seems reasoned in their justification, I don't see how someone would be 'whisteblowing' here.
FYI the state also made the claim that this issue was persistent, it wasn't just this one thing, and that she made changes to the site without consulting with her team, or the epidemiologists supporting the initiative, which is not good.
It's hard to make a full conclusion but I don't think it looks very good for a whistleblowing case.
There has a been a repeated pattern in Florida to hide and obfuscate data. The Governor's Office has been trying to paint a particular version of events since day one. Everything from putting pressure on the law firm representing the Miami Herald trying to get data, to preventing coroners in the state from publishing data. This is just one more item to add to the list.
In a situation where you're fired for refusing to carry out your boss's instructions, it's pretty reasonable to assume that your replacement will be selected, in part at least, on their willingness to do what you would not.
Having that opinion is very different than publicly calling them liars before they've even had a chance to step into the role. Whatever else we ultimately find out about this, it is clear on its face that this act was unprofessional (and to me, destroys her credibility).
How very different is it when the order that was refused to be carried out was lying? In this scenario, someone was fired for effectively not lying. For that person to then make the claim that one could reasonably expect their successor to do the lying they were unwilling to carry out is only logical if they wanted to keep the job. Sure, perhaps calling them "liars" is harsh diction. But what's unprofessional is firing an employee because of their integrity in regards to the truth, especially pertaining to public safety
There are no perfect whistleblowers. If you're looking for something that destroys their credibility, you'll always be able to find one. Your particular complaint here is purely aesthetic and I think we'd all be better off focusing on the substance rather than going ten rounds about word choice and tone.
She's prejudging management. If she was fired for refusing to do something, is management likely to replace her with another person or team who will also refuse to do the same?
I think I understand where you're coming from; the way I see it, she isn't prejudging anybody, maybe if anything judging the people who fired her, but not those who will come after. She believes the reason for her termination was her dedication to the cause, so from her perspective, if whoever took the job after her shared in her dedication, they too would be theoretically fired and replaced until the individual set to fill her position is somebody who would not refuse to "manipulate data"
I found some very interesting quotes towards the bottom of that article, that seem to address some of the concerns about her credibility I've seen in the comments:
> The Tampa Bay Times automatically checks for changes in the data and archives new updates. Shortly before 10:12 a.m on May 4., data still included the EventDate field, showing records with listed dates that people reported symptoms as early as January 1. By 3:02 p.m., the column was gone.
For much of the next day, May 5, the column was either missing or empty, with every row listing “None.” Finally, it returned shortly before 8:02 p.m.
Times reporters asked Health Department spokesman Alberto Moscoso that day why the data disappeared. Two days later, he said, “This field continues to be represented on the Department’s COVID-19 Dashboard.”
Moscoso did not reply to requests for comment Tuesday.
According to internal emails reviewed by the Times, Department of Health I.T. Director Craig Curry emailed Rebekah Jones just before 5 p.m. on May 5. He cited Dr. Carina Blackmore, director for the Division of Disease Control and Health Protection.
“Per Dr. Blackmore, disable the ability to export the data to files from the dashboard immediately. We need to ensure that dates (date fields) in all objects match their counterpart on the PDF line list published,” Curry wrote.
The tables in the PDF documents did not include the column of data showing when symptoms were first reported, only the “Case Date” — the date the state recorded and confirmed the case.
“This is the wrong call,” Jones replied minutes later.
A few minutes later, she emailed Curry again. “Case line data is down.”
Then, just after 6 p.m., the I.T. director emailed both Jones and Dr. Blackmore. “Re-enable for now please.”
Jones replied, “10-4.”
Neither Dr. Blackmore nor Curry replied to requests for comment.
Nothing about the successors. Something like "I've tried to do good work here, and particularly with features A, B, and C. <This organization> does important work, and I'm proud to have been a part of it. (If needed) Sadly, we had crucial disagreements on the handling of the data, and I needed to move on. I wish my successors the best, and stand ready to assist in any way that I can."
If there's something truly horrible going on, go find the best reporter you can and tell them your tale. If you want to make a difference, forsake fame, forsake glory, forsake vengeance, forsake righteousness. Become quiet death to the evil worth fighting.
I think you might have gotten a little carried away with your rhetoric there, that would mean keeping your job. ;) But this serves an important point, which is that vitriolic rhetoric can creep in even when the writer is a Hackernews commenter steeped in a culture of dry language and with no strong emotions or anything at stake. Filtering out information that comes along with vitriol is like filtering out any paragraph that uses the word "and" an even number of times.
I'm drawing the opposite conclusion. That it's hard to conspire to keep the public in the dark about data, due to the large number of people involved in gathering, processing, and presenting it.
Amen. And the weirdest part is it seems like whenever people manipulate the data, it's always to support whatever narrative I oppose. Any time the data supports the narrative I favor, said data is reliable and trustworthy. Has anyone else noticed this? Isn't it weird?
Even if we have all this math at our disposal, there's always a way to include all data points you have private access to show the outcome you want. It would be useful if we had some kind of open record act, as long as it doesn't reveal PII - if a government agency shows us a graph, we should have the means to duplicate it by getting access to the raw data (clipped of PII - i.e. Date of Birth turns into age range buckets) Probably a no-go, but I'm just saying data can be manipulated if you don't have unfettered access to it. I'm not saying this to support this specific case - just pondering a possible answer to your question.
> Rebekah Jones said in an email to FLORIDA TODAY that she single-handedly created two applications in two languages, four dashboards, six unique maps with layers of data functionality for 32 variables covering a half a million lines of data. Her objective was to create a way for Floridians and researchers to see what the COVID-19 situation was in real time.
She will not have a hard time finding further employment.
Assuming she told the truth. Governments typically love bureaucracy and massive projects, seems odd they'd fund any sort of website or app created by a solo dev...
Yeah, after De Santis got lawyers involved to keep a paper from seeking information about the coronavirus at elder care facilities, I'd be more inclined to not believe my (I'm a Floridian) state Government. De Santis is a mini Trump.
And it's incredible how many people are believing her despite the fact she literally provided no evidence of any kind to back up her allegations. Not an email, a text, a screenshot, example of where code or data was changed, absolutely nothing except an email to a local newspaper with next to no details.
There is only so much you can do to cover up a pandemic and an economic depression. People won't need numbers to understand either event when their grandfather dies and they can't get a job to feed their children.
I mean, support is what she gains. If I get fired after getting in a fight with my boss, my version of the story is definitely going to say that my boss was in the wrong and I was heroically standing up to him, even if that's not quite what a neutral observer would say.
But it wouldn't get you your job back. I kind of have to agree with OP here, I feel "follow the money" is often the best way to unravel mysteries. Its really unclear what this person has to gain. You got fired, why make a big public mess out of it, it'll just hurt your career further. Unless she's getting paid by some other involved party for this fabrication, I really don't see the motive from her side.
I'm sure you see the problems with a rule that "follow the money" is ironclad and you'll never believe that someone acted badly unless they were paid to.
The word "money" here is meant as more than just money. Basically you've got to have motives, especially if doing anything that puts you at considerable risk.
I don't think I've seen a single discussion on HN where everyone had the same opinion. There will always be people who disagree or reject claims. That is what makes me still visit HN, since there isn't much discussion if you don't have more than one side represented.
Yes, the COVID-19 subject has generated way more controversy than I ever expected. I'm sure if she was fired for refusing to cover up say, some sort of mass privacy invasion, the general opinion here would be much more unanimous.
If she said "yeah they asked me to do a big privacy violation", with no details about what the privacy violation was, I think people would still be pretty skeptical.
That is true. Some people are terrified of the world not being as just as they think it is. Any whistleblowing at all poses a challenge to their worldview and therefore a threat to their comfort. It provokes a lashing-out as you can see in some of the comments.
Well, she got fired (for one reason or another). The more sympathetic the reason she can make people believe, the easier it will be to get the next job. Not saying she's lying, but there is a clear motive for her to do so here.
That doesn't make sense to me. It's easier to get a new job if you just spin it as a shift in business need & don't look like a troublemaker. Who wants to hire someone who'll think about what they're doing and push back on apparently politically-motivated requests? Nah -- going public with this is a PR disaster for her next job; she should have stayed quiet.
She’s being accused of lying by folks who don’t like what she has to say, simple as that. Contrast this to HN’s response to the tech CEO who was outed as a kkk member who had committed violent hate crimes: most people here bent over backwards to interpret his story in the most sympathetic possible way.
Here’s the thread, go ahead and tally the number of comments that are sympathetic vs unsympathetic to the hate-crime CEO, and compare that to the proportion of comments in this thread that are sympathetic/unsympathetic to the Florida whistleblower: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23007512
Kinda funny how HN commenters decide that certain people’s perspectives need to be “steelmanned” but not others’
You're cherry-picking these two examples to compare precisely because the comparison reinforces your pre-existing view, which is ironically the same response that this subthread is criticizing. There have been plenty of HN comments supporting whistleblowers, and plenty of HN comments decrying things in the KKK bucket.
This is a classic example of the notice-dislike bias that governs how people, especially those with strong views, perceive HN (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). We notice what we dislike, and weight it heavily; we gloss over what we like; poof, bias.
The result is a generalization about HN that is invariably an inverted afterimage of your own preferences (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). And I do mean invariably; I'm not sure I've seen a single case, out of thousands, that violated this pattern.
Needless to say there's an endless litany of people making the opposite generalization about the HN community to the one that you are making (it's overrun by socialists, it's full of SJWs, it's extremely left-biased, blah blah blah). I've posted lists of those many times. Do you really think that they are wrong and you are right?
I feel like “both sidesing” the issue could be countered empirically. Are there really as many pro-“SJW” comments as KKK-forgiving comments, or is that just a comfortable thought-annihilating truism?
I've thought a lot about how this might be studied empirically. The problem is that the only people who'd care strongly enough to bother are people with a strong pre-existing commitment to one side or the other, and any study they produced would be guaranteed to regurgitate the conclusion they've already come to—for a whole bunch of reasons, some obvious, some not so obvious. You'd just re-encounter the same problem at a meta level.
Here's a different way to look at it empirically. Can you, or anyone, find a single example of someone making a strong ideological generalization about HN that wasn't opposed to their own ideological preference? If my analysis is wrong, these shouldn't be hard to find, so let's start with an existence proof. I'm pretty sure I can find thousands of cases the other way around. If that's correct—thousands of cases exist on one side, close to zero on the other—it is surely evidence of something. I claim that it is evidence of a psychological mechanism, and not a weak one.
By the way, while I have you: would you please stop arguing in the flamewar style on HN? It's against the guidelines, it's destructive, and it's tedious. Snarky swipes like "or is that just a [fancy synonym for stupid]" destroy curious conversation and don't belong here. People do this when they're more interested in defeating enemies than in learning from each other, and this site is supposed to be for the latter, not the former.
You unfortunately do this a lot. In fact, the last time you asked me a question (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23018879) I had the same feeling: that it was not a genuine question but a cross-examination, almost of a "have you stopped beating your wife yet" sort. There's a reason why we added "Don't cross-examine" to the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
"Both sidesing" is another example. That's a reductionist label which doesn't reflect back to me how I actually see this problem at all. When you categorize what I'm saying that way, my felt sense is that you want to back me into a corner rhetorically, alongside a bunch of concepts I don't have, but which are easy to argue against. In other words, that you're advancing a step in a fight.
I don't enjoy this impression. I prefer the feeling that the person I'm talking with is curious to understand what I actually think and feel, and is interested in dropping any distorted perceptions they may have, rather than affixing them to me further.
Oh I remember now. The CEO was an abused kid, who joined the KKK and stayed in it till he was about 19; then gradually left. Then 32 years passed.
I am willing to believe 3 decades is enough to change a man. HNs response was also tempered by the fact that many posters are young, so when this man committed his crimes they were not even born.
Throw in the fact that he is Jewish and still joined the KKK, and you can see why some decided he was a deluded or tricked child who escaped the KKK clutches rather than someone who would continue to harbor self-hate for 3 decades, acting as a sleeper agent.
This case now, is about the present day. The researcher can’t claim that any faults are merely past transgressions she has moved beyond. Nor can anyone say they don’t understand the time period this is occurring in (as the time period is now).
Edit:
In the above I reference the KKK, but the CEO was actually a neo Nazi. Same hate. Different clothing.
> she was fired because she was ordered to censor some data, but refused to "manually change data to drum up support for the plan to reopen."
> She provided no further details.
As for why she would lie and what she would gain, she'd gain notoriety and probably a big paycheck from the next company who hires 'a hero' standing up against corrupt government.
She gains the veneer of credibility after being fired for possibly not doing her job.
We have no idea if that's the case, but it's actually pretty easy to see how someone who is arguing with their managers over 'how to report' is then fired, and then makes some grandiose claims.
In her mind she might not even be lying when that could be the case. She believes she's being asked to 'censor' when maybe that's not the case.
We don't know, but we need to know exactly what she was asked to do and not before drawing conclusions.
It's interesting that the crowd who were so outraged at the CPC carefully massaging data are all of a sudden deeply sympathetic to the subtleties of data reporting and presentation and the need to be very conservative when estimating deaths.
Any idea why the elderly voter bloc in Florida hasn’t been able to successfully lobby for total and long term shutdown? I thought their voting power was very high.
"One day before a top Florida Department of Health data manager lost her role maintaining the state’s COVID-19 data, she objected to the removal of records showing people had symptoms or positive tests before the cases were announced, according to internal emails obtained by the Tampa Bay Times." [1]
This does not support the whistleblower narrative, this seems like a front end/front line communications person disagreeing with a decision that is legitimately made by her seniors.
It's hard to tell exactly, but it seems reasonable to me that the board might not want to include such information, as it may be spotty, not consistently collected or reported, and frankly it may have no value to the public good.
The Canadian government, the Ontario/Quebec government, the CBC - nowhere do I see that level of reporting and nobody here is complaining about censorship and whistleblowing.
I think HN has jumped the gun her to assume the validity of this ostensible whistle-blowing action, and I suggest there's some nuance here and no obvious signs of malicious practice.
"As a word of caution, I would not expect the new team to continue the same level of accessibility and transparency that I made central to the process during the first two months. After all, my commitment to both is largely (arguably entirely) the reason I am no longer managing it,” [2] - this is kind of an arrogant assumption. What she should have done instead was made specific reference to the information, why it is important, highlighted the problems in the process and how we can be assured that it's addressed.
And there's this from the same article: “exhibited a repeated course of insubordination during her time with the Department, including her unilateral decisions to modify the Department’s COVID-19 dashboard without input or approval from the epidemiological team or her supervisors.” So it would seem the state is claiming there's some unprofessional behaviour her on her part, and the point about not consulting with the epidemiological team is particularly difficult.
The CDC hasn’t had a single briefing since March. The President came out and stated he’s taking a drug that his own officials say at best, doesn’t do much, and at worst, can kill you, tells you everything you need to know. The whole situation has gotten political. Trump called himself a wartime president but now apparently it’s all a hoax from the democrats.
Don't know why you have been down-voted, the title has been significantly editorialised!
Maybe she was fired for the reasons she claimed, but lets have some diligence at least in our representation and reading of the article, and respect the rules of this site.
Oy, she wasn’t fired. She was removed from her position much like a high school principal removed toward middle-school math teacher. But she wasn’t let go, much less fired.
> The scientist who created Florida's COVID-19 data portal wasn't just removed from her position on May 5, she was fired on Monday by the Department of Health, she said, for refusing to manipulate data.
This person is alleging that Florida is looking to understate deaths, presumably to support their reopening plans. There are also stories of states overstating deaths as well (see https://www.freedomfoundation.com/washington/washington-stat...), presumably to support their intent to retain strict restrictions.
I am guessing generally, there is less malice involved than people ascribe to these situations. We don't have all the facts or perspectives, so let's take things slowly, wait for more information to come out, and analyze the facts with the full picture in front of us. Jumping to outrage mode, which then becomes a hardened position we dig ourselves into, does not help us seek the truth.
Not so much. Even by their own article (with its own biases - show me an article on this site that has ever postulated that there might be merit to restrictions):
> Completing each “cause of death worksheet” involves listing the “immediate cause” of death, the “underlying cause(s)” that initiated the events culminating with the immediate cause of death, and “(o)ther significant conditions contributing to death but not resulting in the underlying cause.” These fields are completed based on the “best medical opinion” of the certifier.
Is not "overstating deaths ... to support their intent to retain strict restrictions". It's stating - as it would with _any other disease_ that the patient had other co-morbidities, just as if you had diabetes, or CHF, etc. It's not the exaggerated, grand standing hyperbole of "Patient in car accident had COVID-19, so COVID-19 was listed as the cause of death", which simply hasn't happened. "Contributing to death, but not the underlying cause, in the best medical opinion of the physician/ME".
In contrast, Florida has numerous documented instances of government interference with this (restricting coroners from reporting _any_ data, pressuring law firms related to the media filing FOI requests).
It's widely regarded as the gold standard, but usually not available weeks or months later. And while it is very reliable, it is somewhat less precise, and therefore not useful to gain a nuanced picture of the disease's impact when there are few deaths.
It’s also extremely slow. Most places are very slow in reporting normal death, ie those from non-notifiable causes. This is very visible in the euromomo data.
Read further down. The article I linked mentions that Washington state said in a prior request that they only count confirmed COVID cases in mortality metrics:
> In its May 8 response to the Freedom Foundation, DOH stated, “All of the deaths currently attributed to COVID-19 had a positive PCR (polymerise chain reaction) test at some point. A PCR test is required in order to classify something as a confirmed case.”
However various other sources now seemingly contradict the answer previously given, since they do count “presumptive” cases in mortality metrics after all:
> DOH’s “Preliminary Guidance for Reporting COVID-19 Deaths” provides: “Coronavirus Disease 2019 or COVID-19 should be reported on the death certificate for all decedents where the disease caused, or is assumed to have caused, or contributed to death.” (emphasis in original)
> Another DOH COVID-19 fact sheet makes a distinction between “confirmed” cases of COVID-19 in which the patient tested positive and “probable” cases involving any of the following factors [...]
So either the initial response was false or the definitions of the metrics changed at some point. The reason this matters is because WA’s governor, Jay Inslee, has instituted the nation’s most strict restrictions, going well beyond what other cautious states like CA have implemented. For example he has banned fishing, hunting, residential construction, prevented rural areas from advancing in reopening phases, etc. Even as some restrictions (like closing all state parks or banning fishing) were reversed, Inslee continues to retain strange nonsensical bans on activities like camping. Certainly there is motive to make the numbers look worse to justify policy overreach or missteps, and it deserves scrutiny.
1. A death _must_ have a positive PCR in order to be _attributed_ to COVID-19. This does not mean that a positive PCR means that the death _will_ be attributed to COVID-19.
2. Documentation of co-morbidities is standard, be it for COVID-19, or any other disease, "where the disease caused, or is assumed to have caused, or contributed to death".
> The reason this matters is because WA’s governor, Jay Inslee, has instituted the nation’s most strict restrictions, going well beyond what other cautious states like CA have implemented. For example he has banned fishing, hunting, residential construction, prevented rural areas from advancing in reopening phases, etc. Even as some restrictions (like closing all state parks or banning fishing) were reversed, Inslee continues to retain strange nonsensical bans on activities like camping.
The entirety of Eastern Washington is in Phase 2 or eligible (and the decision to go to Phase 2 in Adams and Spokane County is on those Counties, not the State, who has said they're eligible), which allows fishing, hunting, construction and camping: https://q13fox.com/2020/05/19/10-more-counties-including-thu...
I am not contesting that the documentation of comorbidities is reasonable or standard. I am however pointing out that the state has said contradictory things when it comes to which deaths are counted as COVID-caused deaths. Their guidance doc reads as follows:
> “Coronavirus Disease 2019 or COVID-19 should be reported on the death certificate for all decedents where the disease caused, or is assumed to have caused, or contributed to death.”
The phrasing "assumed to have caused" is key here and it suggests that at least some deaths were assumed to be COVID-caused even without explicit confirmation (via a PCR test). This means that this prior statement from the state was false:
> “All of the deaths currently attributed to COVID-19 had a positive PCR (polymerise chain reaction) test at some point. A PCR test is required in order to classify something as a confirmed case.”
If the standards for what counts as a COVID-death have changed to be more permissive, then that would have the effect of inflating mortality metrics. But either way the contradicting statements don't help with trust or confidence in their decision making.
As for your statement about Eastern Washington...
> The entirety of Eastern Washington is in Phase 2 or eligible
This literally just came out today. These counties have been asking for this variance for at least a couple weeks and have been rebuffed without any clear reason. Inslee's reopening plans and conferences have historically been vague (without clear metrics or goals) despite claims of being data driven and science based.
And then there's the question of why so many counties in central Washington are not given variances...
> The phrasing "assumed to have caused" is key here and it suggests that at least some deaths were assumed to be COVID-caused even without explicit confirmation (via a PCR test).
Not so much - while the _suggestion_ may be there, I grant you, it doesn't negate the PCR testing. "COVID-19 should be reported on the death certificate" refers to co-morbidities, not (necessarily) cause of death. However, if COVID-19 _is_ considered the cause of death, it should a) be reported, and b) be confirmed by PCR testing.
I'll grant you that the wording may not be clear in inference (particularly read separately, and piecemeal). But one of these statements doesn't and hasn't "supplanted" the other. AND, not OR, in programming parlance.
My understanding of this comes from being involved at a practitioner level working with my County's Public Health, Medic One, and the state DOH. I'm not a physician, but I have been privy to these discussions.
> This literally just came out today. These counties have been asking for this variance for at least a couple weeks
From the article: "This includes Spokane, Adams, Thurston, Mason, Lewis, Clark, Kitsap, Clallam, San Juan and Island counties." With the exception of Spokane and Adams, all those Eastern counties were already in Phase 2.
I have a fleeting suspicion that her story won’t check out. It sounds a lot like they brought on more people to back her because of data and operational errors and she fought back against them to the point where they had to move her away from her position which she took to the media leaving them to let her go.
I’m not saying that is definitely the case but I’m eagerly awaiting their response.
Yes indeed, what I said was a fleeting suspicions was a fleeting suspicion. Are we really at the point in online discourse where being literal is so foreign to people that it needs to be attacked?
I’m basing my suspension on the reported article, I’m not making any accusations. Though as has been reported, there have been issues where poor reporting of numbers (like reporting deaths by date reported instead of date of death), led to significantly distorted interpretations, which good data scientists would tell you that you need to avoid. This is similar to someone making a “technically true” graph with an offset origin to make it look like there is a huge relative difference between two columns. In that case how you make your visuals matter. And if someone tells you that you need to “manually change the origin to zero” and you won’t do it because your report suits your narrative, then that’s an issue. If it’s actually the case that she wanted to keep showing deaths by date reported instead of date of death because a spike appearing in the less acccurate report made it look like deaths spiked after opening up, then that’s a valid issue.
But again, this is all just speculation backing a suspicion and it will be interesting to see their response. Her report is extremely light on details and can’t really be described as whistleblowing as much as just someone venting personal frustrations online and making currenlty unbased accusations. That may change if she provides further details to back her claims of cause.
There has been information added to the article in the meantime, and your little anti-whistleblower fan-fiction is no longer compatible with the facts.
Which, by the way, it never was: the lies you imagine would have been easy and quick to expose. And the (completely imaginary!) smear of incompetence you came up with never really explained why she would feel the need for revenge? At least no more than any other story: maybe she was fired because she was madly in love with Governor? Maybe she accidentally killed her supervisor's dog?
Or, maybe, we should tend trust people. At least as long as any counter-narrative is less believable than 80s porn plots.
Anyone removed from a project they started would have reason for revenge. As I understand the timeline she was told her role would change, then went public with undocumented complaints and accusations at which point they fire her. (Accusations she has since backtracked on it seems, apparently)
If you where told that you where no longer lead on a project at work and your reaction is to email the customers that “the new guys taking over will likely not serve you as well as I have” I expect you’d end up fired as well.
