With the latest West Virginia version of the COVID-19 risk map looking markedly different from the original Harvard Global Health Institute map, Gov. Jim Justice took umbrage to suggestions the state is manipulating the map to reopen public schools more quickly.
West Virginia has counted several hundred positive cases housed in college dorms as one case, in addition to reporting cases in the public school system.
“I really probably would take terrible offense to someone who would say we are manipulating the numbers,” Justice said, telling reporters that the change will increase testing.
On Monday, West Virginia’s version of the map had no counties in red — denoting critically high spread of the virus — and only two counties in orange (Kanawha and Barbour), designating high spread.
Additionally, six counties were gold — a recent tweak by the state to break the orange risk category in two, with limited restrictions on counties falling into the new, lower designation — while 14 counties were yellow, and 33 counties were green, designating that spread of the virus is essentially contained.
By contrast, the Harvard Global map on Monday had two counties in red (Kanawha, Gilmer), 15 counties in orange (including Cabell, Wayne, Putnam, Boone and Fayette counties), 34 counties in yellow, and only four counties in green.
Among the multiple tweaks to the Harvard Global map, a major change came last week when the state decided to count either the number of COVID-19 cases per 100,000 population — the standard Harvard Global metric — or the county’s percentage of positive tests, whichever is lower, to determine each county’s color-coded risk level.
In interviews, a spokesman for Harvard Global — a consortium of leading scientists, epidemiologists and public health experts from around the country — has been critical of West Virginia’s multiple “tweaks” to its map, which measures risk levels county by county across the United States.
“We can’t have different risk-level dashboards for different purposes; that is, we can’t be shifting our metrics to fit our policies,” Dr. Thomas Tsai told the Charleston Gazette-Mail. Tsai is an assistant professor of health and policy management at the Harvard School of Public Health and a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
“I can’t help it that the Harvard people want to criticize,” Justice said, dismissing the Harvard Global metric as a “one-size-fits-all situation that maybe isn’t the best way to go.”
“I don’t know why in the world, all of a sudden, you think the Harvard map is a better map than what the experts right here in West Virginia are doing,” he added.
Meanwhile, numerous schools have closed with outbreaks, while others are changing restrictions.
See POLITICS OVER SCIENCE: WV EDUCATION ASSOCIATION WILL FILE INJUNCTION OVER GOVERNOR JUSTICE'S TAMPERING
| 
