First, "nearly 56%" is not "as much as 50%".New York may have undercounted COVID-19 deaths of nursing home residents by as much as 50%, the state’s attorney general said in a report released Thursday.
Attorney General Letitia James has, for months, been examining discrepancies between the number of deaths being reported by the state's Department of Health, and the number of deaths reported by the homes themselves.
Her investigators looked at a sample of 62 of the state’s roughly 600 nursing homes. They reported 1,914 deaths of residents from COVID-19, while the state Department of Health logged only 1,229 deaths at those same facilities.
If that same pattern exists statewide, James' report said, it would mean the state is underreporting deaths by nearly 56%....
Well sure, but those are mentioned in the article. There was no reason for me to repeat them and I don't mean to imply that the errors I cited are most important. It's just sloppiness that stands out to me.O Really wrote: ↑Thu Jan 28, 2021 1:33 pmI think other questions might be more significant:
Whether attributed to "nursing home" or "hospital", were all covid caused deaths reported somewhere?
Who would benefit by an intentional undercount?
If most everybody who died was counted somewhere, and nobody has a good reason the differences were intentional, then what difference does it make other than providing an opportunity to clarify and standardize reporting standards between the nursing homes and the state.
The nursing homes clearly benefit from this. If the total combined deaths is low, Cuomo and New York health officials benefit.... Part of the gap is explained by a decision by New York's health agency to exclude from its count the number of nursing home patients who die after being transferred to hospitals. Hospital and nursing home officials say the state has ready access to that figure.
If the death toll is actually higher than stated, that increases the mandate to improve nursing home care and may make more resources available for doing so. At least, that's how it should have worked pre-vaccine.... Gov. Andrew Cuomo promised to take a “special” effort to protect nursing homes early on last spring. He tasked James last year with investigating how nursing homes were complying with COVID-19 guidelines last year.
James said her review found that a lack of infection controls at nursing homes also put residents at increased risk of harm, while nursing homes that had lower federal scores for staffing had higher COVID-19 fatality rates.
“As the pandemic and our investigations continue, it is imperative that we understand why the residents of nursing homes in New York unnecessarily suffered at such an alarming rate,” said Attorney General James. “While we cannot bring back the individuals we lost to this crisis, this report seeks to offer transparency that the public deserves and to spur increased action to protect our most vulnerable residents."
It would not surprise me at all if it was found that under reporting was actually due to the profit motive of the owners of these facilities. Some of these places (like Carolina Village in Hendersonville)charge several thousand dollars a month so they have a strong interest in avoiding bad publicity. Plus take into account that the majority of the staff at these places are minimum wage workers who as far as anyone knows bathe in tubs of germs at night and go to work as unwashed hungover minimum wage workers who hate what they do and wish they'd die. But I could be wrong.
It's both.
We would never achieve herd immunity if the vaccine didn't prevent infection in most.
Do you use a snorkel?
Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but I'm interpreting this as the efficacy as it relates to symptoms not the spread.
Vaccine efficacy reflects disease prevention, a poor indicator of transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2 since asymptomatic people can be highly infectious
If it can still always be spread the efficacy is zero.
Isn't the effect of the vaccine is that it prevents the onset of symptoms and sickness of Covid?
For some. For most, though, it prevents infection entirely. This is why Fauci has been saying that widespread vaccination will prevent mutation. Otherwise, all we would be doing is selecting for resistant strains.
Everyone's immune system may be slightly different. For most, an effective vaccine against a virus will prevent infection. For others, they might get infected but the immune response engendered by the vaccine will result in a less serious disease. But the primary value of a vaccine is to prevent infection from the start.