They finally fixed the Alberta COVID statistics!.. sort of
For those that do not know, I track Alberta’s statistics. I am meticulous. I do so because they have the best Canadian data available, and yet it is deeply flawed. Thus far, I have identified dozens of errors in the way they add keep track of the virus. Today, they fixed some of them.
Let me show you.
The first thing you see when you go to Alberta’s vaccine outcomes landing page are some summary statistics. Here is what they looked like yesterday.
There are many problems with these numbers.
Jan 1 heavily weighs the numbers in favor of the vaccinated.
Adding all those with a first or second dose (ie., 3,075,466) is deceptive because people are getting these doses at the same time. This says nothing about person-years with the vaccine nor does it say anything about person-years without the vaccine.
Those who got the vaccine in the first 14 days of the first dose are added onto the unvaccinated category. This is more than 10,000 cases making the unvaccinated look much worse and the vaccine much better.
As I said, the number of cases is skewed towards being unvaccinated because of (2) and (3).
Hospitalized in the first 14 days of the vaccine is the same as in (3) and this is skewed because of (2).
Deaths are the same as in (3) & (5) and these are skewed because of (2). To be more specific about the latter, 500 deaths occured before even 13% were partially vaccinated.
The new case numbers do not add up to the daily changes in the aforementioned numbers. For example, the new cases yesterday in the vaccinated was closer to 50%, not 40%.
It’s difficult to see what is happening in active cases and hospitalizations because the numbers are opaque, but they are likely undercounting vaccinated by a wide margin.
Well, they fixed some of these errors (finally). Here is today.
As you can see, they stopped lumping those dying in the first 14 days with the unvaccinated. They sneakily did not add the over 10,000 cases in the first 14 days of the first dose anywhere. It would be nice to see a seperate category for that, and all of the other aforementioned problems fixed. But this is a start towards being less fucking evil about the way the statistics are represented. If only we could trust their data collection methods.
I will not go too deep into the other problems on this page ie.,
Their lies about vaccine effectiveness.. I have been monitoring this data for months and it is nowhere close to what they claim; or,
The way their chart overcalculates the rates in the unvaccinated by removing numbers from the denominator everytime someone gets vaccinated while leaving the numerator the same; or,
The fact that the deaths in the last 120 days do not add up to their data files or my daily monitoring; or,
The fact that they claim 95% of deaths in healthy persons during the entire pandemic has happened in the last 120 days; or,
The lack of transparency on the cases/deaths of people with boosters.
But suffice it to say, there are many more problems on this page alone.
All that said, I am happy they at least fixed something.
Thank you. I have been proof over the Alberta data as well. Alberta is using he statistics manipulatively to give the general impression covid is much more dangerous than it is, that the vaccine is more effective than it is, and that he vaccine is much less dangerous than it is.
Some notes:
- being overweight or obese is universally recognized as being very strongly correlated to severe covid outcomes and deaths. Alberta does not recognize obesity as a comorbidity. If you added obesity as a comorbidity to Alberta’s data, my guess is that you would find covid hospitalizations and deaths would occur almost-never in people with no comorbidities (inclusive of obesity), especially in younger people.
- Alberta’s adverse event reporting per dose he last time I checked discloses adverse events and serious adverse events following vaccination in similar proportions (relative to the kinds of adverse events). Curiously, Alberta reports lower case rates of serious adverse events (per dose) than the rest of Canada. I do not believe this is a coincidence.
There are many others.
THe most egregious behaviours are the misleading claims, and the general impressions given that the disease is of equal deadliness to every person in Alberta.
If a pharmaceutical company were making such statements, they would be violating many provisions of the federal Food and Drugs Act which prohibits advertising that:
- give a general impression that a disease is more harmful than it is, and that a drug designed to treat or prevent it safe without identifying real risks.
- obscures or misstates the medical risk/benefit of the drug.
- does not differentiate between the risk/benefit by demographic group or patient status.
Because all of these things get in the way of achievement of the goal of informed consent (which was universally demanded by principles of medical ethics - until covid vaccines were authorized on an emergency basis).
Pharmaceutical companies have received multimillion dollar fines for such behaviours. What the Alberts government is doing by definition in this federal statute is in fact contrary to he Food and Drugs Act by definition inasmuch as such behaviours are considered advertising, and the drug need not be offered for sale. Advertising of this nature by a party engaging in Distribution of the drug is treated the same as a sale.
There is so much more to say as the propaganda is wide and deep. And that is before doctors are threatened by their governing bodies for disagreeing with the narrative.
We need more analysis. Less misleading statements. Less lying with statistics. Less outright lying.
Keep up the great work!
I applaud your data-driven approach. Even if an interpretation warrants reexamination, we should always be searching for the objective truth in the actual data. Thank you for doing so.
It is true that looking at total outcomes dating back to Jan 1 provides little context in terms of the percentage of the population by vaccine status. I'm glad you could help those unfamiliar with this information understand what is and isn't clear from those specific data. We should not look at those numbers and assume all those deaths happened among a tiny number of unvaccinated people.
However, you neglect 2 critical points in your post:
1) Inclusion of negative outcomes within 2 weeks of vaccination is not a misrepresentation - vaccines were designed to provide strong protection, but only reliably after 2 weeks. We can't blame COVID for the death of someone already imminently dying of cancer. We can't say that exercise doesn't make us stronger just because we don't see results after the first workout. And we can't blame the vaccine for not working the instant it is delivered, in some cases after a person is already infected. It isn't a cure, it is a preventative tool that takes some time to work. If anything, the reduced cases and bad outcomes seen for some diagnosed at day 11 or 12 or 13 after vaccination is actually a bias against vaccines - because some of those people would have derived partial benefit as their immune system responded to the vaccine, but their positive outcomes are lumped in with those people who had not been vaccinated at all.
2) You also should be driving readers to the published statistics on the same page which relate to current outcomes (under Vaccine Outcomes. NOT Severe Outcomes.). As we agree, the Jan 1 numbers provide little context. But AHS publishes detailed stats that relate to cases in the past 120 days (when a majority of people had at least some vaccine protection), demonstrating disproportionate risk of bad outcomes among the unvaccinated - normalized by the number people actually vaccinated at the time. Moreover, even your own screenshots show *current* data in the bottom half. Current (confirmed) active cases, new cases (from this week), and current hospitalizations. Given the sharp rise in hospitalizations over raw case numbers for the unvaccinated, it becomes very clear that they are being hospitalized at a much greater rate, especially since now 75% of the entire population are partially vaccinated, and 70% are fully vaccinated. (Another detail this data cannot tell us: why exactly fewer confirmed unvaccinated cases lead to greater hospitalization rates. Is it because the unvaccinated get much sicker - or because the unvaccinated tend not to get tested when they are sick, so there are fewer cases confirmed by testing out of a larger-than-average pool of actual COVID cases, leading to hospitalizations only *appearing* to happen more often, due to greatly undercounting COVID infections among the unvaccinated.)
Actually, to be strictly fair, we should look at vaccination rates from 2+ weeks ago, which are 73% (partial) and 68% (full) respectively. So those current numbers show that 69% of current hospitalizations are among the unvaccinated (or got their shot less than 2 weeks ago), while they themselves are only 27% of the population. Meanwhile only 25% of current hospitalizations are from the 68% of the population which were fully vaccinated at least 2 weeks ago.
I agree that the opacity with some of this data is troubling, and I would really like to understand more about what goes on underneath the hood. The statistics you reference are updated retroactively with new information, and therefore are understood not to match the daily summary update. Robson Fletcher at CBC has a page on COVID statistics that explains this in more detail, and why it is done. It isn't meant to obfuscate, but to offer mostly-reliable and timely updates daily (in the summary) and then provide a record of fully-researched and confirmed information - which takes longer to produce - to be available for posterity and long-term analysis.