A report promoted by the Oregon Health Authority (OHA) has been corrected after falsely claiming nearly 50 percent of children aged 12 to 17 who contracted COVID-19 required hospital treatment.
The Rede Group, which created the report for the authority, acknowledged the misinformation in a memorandum obtained by The Epoch Times.
“There was an issue with the numerator for hospitalizations in Figure 40 on page 180. When we calculated the percent hospitalized for each age group, we mistakenly thought the weekly hospitalization data from OHA were unique; they are not,” Danna Drum with the Rede Group told OHA in the memo. “We should have noticed this earlier and apologize for the error. Figure 40 has been corrected in version 1.1 of the report using data provided directly from OHA.”
“Thank you for your attention to the matter and we apologize again for this error,” Drum added.
The old version of the report claimed that 47.4 percent of children aged 12 to 17 who contracted COVID-19 required hospital care.
According to OHA data, that percentage is actually at or below 1 percent.
The report also claimed that the hospitalization rates for all age groups were at or above 30 percent and portrayed the child hospitalization rates as higher than those of the elderly.
The new version of the report (pdf) presents significantly lower rates.
There was no indication in the report that it had been updated besides the addition of “(corrected)” to the graph’s title.
The Epoch Times asked OHA about the false claim, which led to OHA asking the Rede Group to examine the paper.
“The report has been updated with the correct data, and it has been reposted. You can find the new version of the report at the same link as before,” an OHA spokesman told The Epoch Times via email.
The Rede Group did not respond to a request for comment on the correction.
State Sen. Dennis Linthicum, a Republican, told The Epoch Times in an email that the false information showed “poor statistical analysis” and was part of a pattern “of using public money to stir-up vast quantities of statistics, data, and meaningless factoids which veils the malfeasance and parades the contempt which our bureaucratic elites exhibit toward Oregonians, and people in living in the United States.”
Read the full story here.
Scroll down to leave a comment and share your thoughts.
