DeWine Administration Still Hiding Key Data from Public
From the Ohio Statehouse News, July 8, 2020
Throughout the COVID19 pandemic, the DeWine administration in Ohio has continued to make it difficult to easily understand the relevant data. In fact, they have continually hidden or not even reported the total tests taken by Ohioans. This appears to be part of the plan to needlessly frighten Ohioans and shut down our economy. Together, with his willing allies in the liberal media, they have employed a number of classic misdirection techniques in order to accomplish their goals. We’ll break down those methods for you below.
The Surge in New Cases Fallacy
A July 8, 2020 Columbus Dispatch headline helps explain how this fallacy works. It screams, “Ohio’s spike continues with fourth-highest number of daily cases!”
But what the Columbus Dispatch and the DeWine administration fails to report is that this increase in cases simply reflects the fact that Ohio has significantly ramped up its daily testing numbers. For example, on July 2, 2020 Ohio reported a whopping 1,265 new cases. But what they didn’t tell us is that on July 2, 2020 Ohio also performed a whopping 20,613 COVID19 tests, one of their highest totals to date. In fact, it took until June 30, 2020 before Ohio was able to even perform 20,000 tests per day! You can see part of this information for yourself buried in the ODH website here..
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A surge in new reported cases is only happening because Ohio has quadrupled its daily tests over the past several months. We aren’t seeing an increase in the actual percentage of positive tests. To say that these new cases are the result of a surge, is simply fake news.
The Surge in the Positive Rate Fallacy
Under this fallacy, the DeWine administration and their liberal media allies are arguing that the percentage of positive cases are going up. An article first written and posted on July 6, 2020 helps explain how this works. According to the Columbus Dispatch, “the infection rate actually is going up, to more than 6% during the recent spike in coronavirus cases.”
This is also fake news. The most recent data buried in Ohio’s COVID19 website shows a positive daily test rate percentage of 5% as of July 6, 2020. The highest daily percentage positive rate was 37% reported on April 19, 2020. We also saw a positive percentage spike of 18% on April 1, 2020. The lowest daily percentage positive rate was 3% reported on June 8, 2020.
By May 7, 2020 the once higher positive percentage rate had dropped to 9% and it has hovered in the range of 4 to 6% throughout most of May, June, and July. Overall, as of July 8, 2020 Ohio has completed a whopping 896,485 tests and found 58,904 positive cases. That is an overall total positive rate of 6.5% according to data from the The COVID Tracking Project.
The Multiple Positive Counting Fallacy
According to Investigative Journalist Jack Windsor, people that test positive multiple times count as separate, individual cases. In other words, if I test positive in four different tests on four different days, that counts as four cases, not just as one person that’s tested positive. How many sick people in Ohio are testing positive again and again for COVID19? We don’t know and the DeWine administration isn’t telling.
The DeWine administration and its liberal allies are using these classic tricks of cherry picking and selectively reporting data, or they are outright hiding data from the public. Don’t be fooled. It’s classic fake news.
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