CDC left two Pennsylvania measles deaths out of its count; woman becomes the third anyway

…(cont) That's the number I can't get past. Two.

Now I want to be fair, because that's step three, and it's a real one: one of those two deaths was a six-week-old infant who also had a rare genetic condition, Amish lethal microcephaly. That's a legitimate thing to check. The Lancaster County coroner did the checking, confirming on September 4th that measles caused the child's death anyway.

Step four is where I keep losing the thread. Four days after the CDC said it needed more time — one day after the coroner gave it the answer — the Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., went on camera and accepted that the infant died of measles. In the same breath, he accused Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro of politicizing a dead child. That's in The Hill, September 5th. So the review that held up two rows in a federal count closed four days after it opened, and the day it closed is the day the secretary picked to talk about somebody else turning it into politics.

I don't have an opinion about that. I'm just telling you the order it happened in, because I wrote it down twice to make sure I had it right, and it still reads the same both times.

Here's my demonstration, and it's a small one. I balance my own checkbook every Sunday at the kitchen table — yeah, I know, I said I'd leave the kitchen alone this week, so let's do it on the porch instead, same idea. I write down what came in, what went out, and if a number's wrong I don't leave it off the page while I "investigate." I cross it out and I fix it, right there, dated, so anybody looking over my shoulder can see what I changed and when. What I don't do is quietly not write the number for a few days and then, once somebody else confirms I owed it, complain that my wife brought it up at dinner.

Now it's September 13th. A 40-year-old woman in Jefferson County died from measles, and every outlet I've got calls her the state's third death this year, in the country's worst outbreak in 35 years. Third. I keep coming back to two — two rows the CDC held out of its own count for four days while a health official was already confirming one of them — and now the count everyone's using has moved on to three like the two were always sitting there.

So excuse me, before you go — I know I already brought this up, and I'm sorry, but let me put it one more way, differently this time: is she the third measles death in Pennsylvania this year, or is she only the third one the count is willing to admit to, on a page where two of the rows spent four days not existing at all?