Dear Editors:
I need to report and apologize for an error (misinformation) in my last LTE in the Sentinel, Nov 22, and which similarly was published in two articles in GraniteGrok Sept 26, Nov 12.
I took active cases for the USA and the world from worldometers.info/coronavirus and took their ratio, getting a result slightly higher than 50%. Worldometers generally calculate active cases as cases minus deaths minus recoveries. However, in the USA’s case, Worldometers adds up these results for the states and the territories to get the USA total.
A doctor/researcher/friend from Maine today noticed that a number I had stated for Maine was in error and let me know there was a problem in calculating Maine’s recovery numbers.
It turns out there are 12 states and DC which have this problem: their recovery numbers are treated as zero in the summing for the USA total. Worldometers’ calculations for active cases are too high because the actual recoveries are not counted for these states.
We want to thank Joseph Mirzoeff for this Op-Ed. If you have an Op-Ed or LTE
you want us to consider, please submit it to Editor@GraniteGrok.com.
This is good news!
I can’t know the actual recoveries by state but can estimate them based on recovery rates in other states. My best guess is that the 9.7 million active USA cases reported today by Worldometers should be closer to 4 million.
The 21.1 million world active cases would be more like 15.4 million. The ratio of the two would be 26% instead of 46%. The USA’s portion of the world’s active cases that I had previously reported as 50%+ should have been more like 30% at those times.
Joseph Mirzoeff
Keene NH
