Playing Number Games.

As noted in my last post, Gov. DeWine has signaled a movement away from the Ohio Public Health Advisory System (aka, the Map of Fear) because under the new rules, the state will be stuck in red perpetually with sufficient testing.

So to replace this map, he announced two new maps, to be updated weekly and found at https://coronavirus.ohio.gov/static/OPHASM/key-measures.pdf
These two measures look at cases per capita WHICH CAN BE CONTROLLED SOLELY BY TESTING WITH FAULTY TESTS AND IS SEVERELY PUNITIVE TO RURAL COUNTIES.

The second map shows ICU utilization by region (first attached image), and these percentages look quite alarming.

Until you understand where they are coming from. If you look at https://coronavirus.ohio.gov/.../key.../hospitalizations and look at ICU bed utilization by these same regions, the percentages are nowhere near what is listed on the new map.

What has happened? This is shown in the second image. Instead of looking at COVID positive (not necessarily ill with COVID) utilization out of the total ICU beds, they have decided to look at the percentage of COVID+ patients out of the total number of ICU beds *utilized.*

What this means is that if there are 100 total ICU beds in a region and 1 is occupied by a COVID positive patient (again, not necessarily in the ICU because of COVID) and 1 patient that is not COVID positive, under this new measure -

, that region would have 50% COVID utilization. If there is just 1 COVID positive patient and 0 non-COVID patients, the COVID utilization would be 100%.

Also, the number of COVID patients could remain the same from day to day, or even decrease, and depending on the number of other ICU occupants, the utilization % could actually increase. This is nonsense.

The final suspect aspect of this new 'Key Measure' is, yet again, there is no sense of magnitude. I have attached Region 7's data, the second 'worst' in the state. But when we look at absolute numbers -

- , we can see that this region of 431,109 people has had an average of just 21 COVID positive patients in the ICU on any given day between 12/17 and 12/23. That's 0.00494% of that region's population.

Even more incredible, the average number of EMPTY ICU beds in the region is ~24 during that same week. COVID positive ICU bed use could double in the region, and they still wouldn't be at capacity.

Yet again, we have data skewed to the most alarmist possible take, and skewed with ever more creative methods. At what point will Gov. DeWine and ODH stop trying to terrify the state into financial ruin and finally acknowledge that the worst case scenario will never come to pass?

#InThisTogetherOhio

Part 2 of "Playing With Numbers" to follow this afternoon. Stay tuned!