How government bureaucracies confirm our suspicions about political influence.

KDHE doctored a COVID case chart to justify mask mandates

KDHE Secretary Lee Norman shared a COVID case chart with media this week, which he said shows the counties that abided by Governor Kelly’s mask mandate are ‘winning the battle.’ But he deceptively doctored the chart to justify mask mandates.

At about the 15-minute mark of the recording, a reporter asks (according to Norman’s restatement of the hard-to-hear question, “If the no-mask counties would start masking, would it (blue line) drop, and would it dip down below the mask counties.”

Norman said, “I think it would.”

The reporter clearly read the chart as showing the masked counties (the orange line) now have fewer daily cases than the unmasked counties (the blue line).

But the chart was consciously manipulated to produce that appearance by comparing the same data (cases per day) on different axes.

Cases for mandate counties are based on the left axis, with a range of 15 to 25, while those without mandates are based on a secondary axis on the right, with a scale of 4 to 14.

But the results look dramatically different when shown below on the same axis.  The mask counties show a decline and the trend is down a bit for those without mandates.  But Dr. Norman doesn’t want people to see that counties with mask mandates have about 77% more daily cases per capita than the counties without mandates. 

He told reporters that the unmasked counties might dip below the others if they ‘masked-up’ but those counties already have fewer cases!

Many counties that rejected Governor Kelly’s statewide mandate did so because there were very few cases in their counties.  As of August 3, less than 1% of the Kansas population was confirmed to have had COVID at some time, and the rates of hospitalization and death have been steadily declining.

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