Opacity and Imprecision: Friends of Bureaucrats

"You're asking the wrong question, Jacob."
--Lou Zabel (Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps)

These pages have discussed inflating COVID-19 death counts as a means of masking Type I error in public health policy. Evidence continues to grow that this is being done on a broad scale.

Dr Deborah Birx, response coordinator of the White House task force on the coronavirus pandemic, reportedly voiced frustration at a recent task force meeting with the CDC's antiquated virus data tracking system--a system that she suspects may be inflating statistics such as mortality and case counts by up to 25%.

Why in the world would the country's primary public health agency operate opaque, imprecise systems for collecting information during a pandemic?

This is the wrong question. The real question is, "Why should we expect otherwise?"

Opacity and imprecision are the friends of bureaucrats operating under conditions of active agency. The last thing they want is a system that makes them accountable for their actions.