Day 363 Retrospective: Undercounted

Time flies when you're COVID-fatigued! We're fast approaching Year 2 of COVID here in Massachusetts, but Thursday's banner story was out of New York State, where the New York Times reported some serious undercounting of nursing home deaths:

[...] Health Department officials made public new data that added more than 3,800 deaths to their tally, representing nursing home residents who had died in hospitals and had not previously been counted by the state as nursing home deaths.

The state’s acknowledgment increased the overall death toll related to those facilities by more than 40 percent. Ms. James’s report had suggested that the state’s previous tally could be off by as much as 50 percent.

The findings do not change the overall number of Covid-19 deaths in New York — more than 42,000, the most of any state — but the recalculation in the number of nursing home deaths illustrates how unprepared the nursing home industry was in the first and deadliest weeks of the pandemic.

Massachusetts' cases were up nine tenths of a percentage point on Thursday. (Note that MDPH case data has been in a much nicer format at Tableau since January 4th.)