There is more:
5. Positive Test Rate (County) 18.9%
Positive test rate is defined by the number of positive tests divided by the total number of individual tests given. There are lots of problems with this calculation. The first problem is that the COVID testing methods are new and there are lots of false positives as well as false negatives. Then, depending on how the particular test works, a person can be newly infected with COVID and before the COVID is fully incubated would also give a false negative. No top of that, most people would NOT seek out a COVID test unless they already had COVID symptoms such as a runny nose, congested breathing, etc. Which would give a higher percentage of likely COVID positive tests than if everybody, symptoms or not, were tested.
6, Positive Test Rate (County) 14.7%
Besides being numbers for another county and not knowing how good those numbers are, this is only for comparison and should NOT be very relevant to whether or not schools are restarted in Cleveland County. Note that their other comparisons later in this article that indicate major COVID rates in Cleveland County.
7. Cleveland County Residents currently Hospitalized: 55
Another meaningless number when used all by itself. Some people are hospitalized for a very long time and some people that go to the hospital with COVID are not admitted into the hospital, just sent home.
8. Deaths 169
The number of actual COVID Deaths are of a very high concern. But most everybody realizes that there is so much COVID money floating around now that Health Care facilities are sorely tempted to report a death from other causes as a COVID death. Greed is a strong temptation for fraud. And very few would deny that Healthcare facilities have people on staff to figure out just how much cost the market will bear. Especially when the dead body is buried or cremated and nobody can prove whether or not the Death was actually from COVID.
CONCLUSION:
The conclusion of a critical analysis of these Cleveland County Health Department reported “snapshot” numbers is that there is nothing here that can be used as a reliable indication of a criteria on whether or not to restart schools.
So, lets look at another set of “snapshot” numbers, compare them with these numbers and see what we get. Maybe a useful “Trend.”
1-20-2021 Health Department Numbers:
Changes: January 20 -13, 7 days Change
Total Cases-week change
8,706 – 8,115
591
Prior Day Change
109 – 69
40 gone up
New cases last 7 days
603 – 802
-199 gone down
Estimated # Recovered Cases
7,929 – 7,145
784
Positive Test Rate County
15.6% – 18.9%
-3.3% gone down
Positive Test Rate State
11.8% – 14.7%
-2.9% gone down
CC Residents in Hospital
45 – 55
-10 gone down
Deaths-Change in week
174 – 168
6 more deaths
Again, conflicted and meaningless numbers relative to decisions to restart schools.
Then, the Cleveland County Health Department changed their update reporting. Leaving a lot of meaningless numbers out. Below is the newest update.
CLEVELAND COUNTY COVID-19 UPDATE 1/25/2021
As of today, there have been a total of 9,028 cases of COVID-19 in Cleveland County. There are an estimated 460 active cases and 8,392 cases have recovered. There are currently 44 Cleveland County residents who are hospitalized and we have had a total of 176 COVID-related deaths in the county.
Conclusion:
There are no data in this update, or anywhere else that I can find, helpful to a decision to restart Schools. This is NOT a surprise since all the original data was to keep schools shut down for political reasons. Not to restart schools.
Also, according to the Cleveland County Health Department website, most of the activity has NOW shifted to vaccination schedules and updates to the websites themselves. Any priority the Health Department might have ever had, has now shifted totally away from information useful to restarting schools.
I smell a rat in the Health Department shifting away from previous record keeping, as poor as it was. Why has the new Health Department AND the County Commissioners no longer attending School Board meetings? What is the Health Department and the County Commissioners hiding from???
So, I decided to look at some North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services (NCDHHS) records for all the counties in North Carolina. I started with Cleveland County and then looked at all the surrounding counties. I began to see a pattern. A frightening pattern.
CLEVALND COUNTY HAS ONE OF THE HIGHEST DEATH RATES PER COVID CASES IN ALL OF NORTH CAROLINA
I started with Cleveland County as a baseline and looked at the surrounding counties. Then, I spread out to other Counties with a similar COVID cases numbers or similar Deaths numbers. I looked at the largest counties as well as smaller counties and those in between. I recorded the first 18 counties and provided them below. Most all of the other counties showed this very same pattern.
