Scientists Studying The Coronavirus Say Some States Are Censoring Them

State officials in Florida, Arizona, and Georgia have reportedly been censoring scientists or providing questionable COVID-19 case data while pushing for early reopenings.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/danverga...ink_uid=12

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....The accuracy of case count data is essential for safe state reopenings, which rely on declining case numbers, accurate testing data, and hospitalization rates to proceed in states like Virginia and California, still under regional lockdowns.

A recent Georgia Tech report suggested that people staying at home rather than readily mixing after Georgia’s reopening would cut the peak of June and July cases in the state by 40%. That makes strong public messages about physical distancing and staying at home crucial during any reopenings, the report concluded.

“When public health agencies are not being transparent, not being complete and accurate over the long term, they are fundamentally undermining the trust of the public,” said George Washington University health policy professor Jeffrey Levi. The pandemic will likely see repeated periods of calls for stronger physical distancing to blunt future outbreaks, making this particularly dangerous, he added. “The next time you tell them to trust your data, they won’t.”

The pandemic is already a tough situation for collecting accurate data, Levi noted. Many people don’t get tested because of a lack of symptoms or poor access to tests, and reports from New York, New Jersey, and Michigan have suggested large undercounts of deaths are likely. A healthcare company in Florida reported on Tuesday that as many as 33,000 people there were given unreliable diagnostic tests, not the first time that unreliable tests have muddied the waters for epidemiologists.

Most worrisome, the three-week lag between the onset of a COVID-19 outbreak and deaths in hospitals shooting upward makes maintaining public trust in public health agencies even more crucial, said Levi. He called the allegations being raised against the state public health agencies altering data and censoring scientists "unprecedented."
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“Anything short of full transparency does not serve the public good,” American Public Health Association President Lisa Carlson told BuzzFeed News. “People make mistakes; people dispute data. What’s important is to get to, and to maintain, accurate, timely, and complete data — and transparency.”

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