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| Greg Nash/Pool via AP |
As the nation all-too slowly emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic nightmare we’ve endured for over two years, we are only beginning to get data back on the myriad horrors brought about by shortsighted policies that were forced upon us in the name of public health.
None of it is pretty.
One would presume that public health policy would protect or foster some sort of, you know, health. Alas, since the government is involved, words don’t always mean what they’re supposed to.
In the rush to mitigate the spread of the COVID virus, public health policy could have best been described as a lot of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. This was understandable and forgivable in the early stages of the pandemic when officials didn’t have any idea about what they were dealing with. As the pandemic wore on, however, it became more about exercising power than saving lives.
Take school shutdowns, for example. Teachers’ unions fought tooth and nail to keep schools closed, acting as if they were on the front lines in the battle of Fallujah and in mortal peril. The consequences for the kids were never taken into account. We’re just beginning to find out about some of the damage that was done. There is no way that the post mortem news on this subject is going to get any better.
We do have the first numbers in about specific non-COVID health-related issues, like alcohol-related deaths. --->READ MORE HERE
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| Photograph: Xinhua/REX/Shutterstock |
A quiet change to how the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) publicly reports Covid death details underscores the need for the agency to communicate clearly and transparently about rapidly evolving science, experts say.
The past two years have created numerous communication challenges for the agency, which works with massive amounts of data from scores of different sources, including states and territories.
“Mistakes are inevitable because humans are fallible, but there should always be an effort promptly to explain what happened and what’s being done to prevent it from happening again,” said Tom Frieden, a former CDC director and the president and CEO of Results Save Lives.
“You have to over-communicate, basically,” he said. “Any time there is something that needs to be corrected, be upfront about it: here’s what happened, here’s what we know, here’s what we don’t know.”
Last week, after reporting from the Guardian on mortality rates among children, the CDC corrected a “coding logic error” that had inadvertently added more than 72,000 Covid deaths of all ages to the data tracker, one of the most publicly accessible sources for Covid data.
The agency briefly noted the change in a footnote, although the note did not explain how the error occurred or how long it was in effect. --->READ MORE HEREFollow links below to relevant/related stories and resources:
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