I love statistics.
Some people dig through a newspaper article or even the sports page looking for comparable numbers, but I’ve always had an unhealthy level of enjoyment for the numbers of a situation.
While I enjoyed Sports Illustrated to itch my sports interest, by far the publication I sought out the most growing up was Baseball Weekly (now Sports Weekly).
Baseball Weekly was put out by USA Today, and every week during the season, a new edition arrived full of new stats for every single player in the major leagues.
I invented statistics to measure players back before I even knew who Bill James or what sabermetrics were (and if you still don’t, it’s okay). The game I loved had a great way to measure the success or failure of a player — numbers were everywhere.
There is a line in the movie “For Love of the Game” where the lead actor Kevin Costner responds to a comment from his love interest with the quick comeback, “It’s baseball, we count everything!”
While most baseball statistics are pretty clearly counted, I found as I experienced statistics in other walks of life that, frankly, numbers lie.
Do they really, though?
The numbers themselves don’t lie. It’s typically someone who is arranging what are truthful, factual numbers into a way to make those numbers line up to better support the person’s own belief or claim, that is purveying the falsehood.
That’s where we’ve come with COVID-19.
Many have altered traditionally accepted manners of tabulating things like mortality rate (number of dead from an illness divided by number who were infected by the illness), positive testing rate, and most notably, especially in this state, the percent of population tested.
Let’s take a person named Pat. Pat tests positive for COVID-19.
The way the South Dakota Department of Health (DOH) would track things, that first positive test shows up as a positive case and a test taken in Pat’s home county. Pat would also be considered an active case.
Pat takes four more tests that still show that Pat remains positive with the virus. Nothing changes on the case number because Pat is still just one positive case, but now the county has a total of five tests just from Pat. Pat would still be considered an active virus case.
Pat is utilizing antigen testing, so to confirm a negative test for work, Pat must test negative twice via antigen testing more than 24 hours apart. That finally occurs for Pat to return to work after seven negative tests.
Pat is now recorded as a recovered case by the DOH numbers, a negative case, and also seven MORE tests.
In the end, to return to work, Pat now shows up as a positive case, a negative case, a recovered case, and 12 tests for the county Pat resides in.
While the fact that Pat has tested both positive and negative means that by cases, Pat would register as two cases, Pat would register as 12 tests.
When Governor Noem or the DOH states that testing is significantly higher, it’s because, for some reason, they have chosen to use the 12 tests as a measure of whether each resident in the state is being tested. That was a decision made early on, and it’s skewed percentage numbers ever since.
Luckily, I’m still a statistics and numbers fan. I have a spreadsheet with 10 individual sheets (one for the state’s daily numbers, one for each county the Plainsman covers, one for the overall totals for those seven counties, and one more in-depth sheet examining overall numbers for every county in the state). Each of those sheets has between 13 and 23 columns. Let’s just say, I have data to review.
At the end of each month of the pandemic, numbers have varied widely between tests and cases, but it’s gotten dramatic as of late, and when antigen testing numbers were added recently, it got extremely out of hand. In June, the state added 36,694 cases, both positive and negative, and recorded 48,687 tests. That’s roughly 1.3 tests per case.
The state reported recording issues that lost much of the July data to the ether and then returned with a new look and new data in August, but it’s been very heavily weighted to tests. In August, the state added 34,893 cases while recorded 69,883 tests (2.0 tests per case).
The state followed that up with a dip in tests per case in September, as the virus spiked in the state even further, recording 44,241 cases on 77,254 tests (1.75 tests per case).
However, the number has rocketed up in October, when the governor and DOH are publicly stating that testing rates are the reason behind additional positive cases. Instead, the state has reported nearly a 2.5 test per case rate.
The inclusion of antigen testing in October has added significant tests to the total that shows up for this month and does skew numbers to some degree, but if the result of testing more was more cases, there would be significantly more positive cases, not just total tests, to the tune of 5,000 more positive cases at September’s test to case rate.
What there has been in South Dakota in October is twice the amount of deaths in the month as any other month during the pandemic, and easily the most hospitalizations of any month of the pandemic.
Those are not things caused by more testing.
Now, how to spin THOSE numbers...
