Earlier today I noticed a comment in HaitiLibre.com about the sudden absence of Port-au-Prince cholera statistics in the MSPP's December 21-26 posts on its Documentation page. Tonight I went through those posts, and found something very strange.
Bear with me, because this will involve numbers. Between December 21 and 26, MSPP tells us, Haiti recorded 8,161 new cases of cholera. Of these, 5,908 required hospitalization. Death resulted in 175 of these cases, bringing the total deaths to 3,333.
On December 21, Port-au-Prince recorded 562 new cases, of which 205 required hospitalization. Two persons died.
On December 22, 378 cases and 173 hospitalizations. One death.
On December 23, Port-au-Prince had just 17 new cases of cholera and zero hospitalizations. Zero deaths.
December 24: Just 6 new cases, zero hospitalizations. Zero deaths.
December 25: 9 cases, zero hospitalizations. Zero deaths.
December 26: 4 cases, zero hospitalizations. Zero deaths.
No one in Port-au-Prince, the MSPP tells us, has died of cholera since December 22.
This seems like such an extraordinarily happy turn of events that you'd expect PAHO and all the NGOs to explode with joy over breaking the epidemic's back.
But how could a ruined city with a million people living under plastic tarps go from 378 cases on the 22nd to 17 on the 23rd? That's a 95 percent drop in 24 hours, probably the best evidence for the existence of God we have seen since the Resurrection.
The medieval scholar William of Occam, however, cautions us to accept the simplest explanation that fits the facts. Occam's Razor obliges us to reject divine intervention (however belated), and to smell a rat.
If you can misreport an election, you can certainly misreport cholera cases. If that has happened, PAHO, USAID, and all the other agencies should blow the whistle at once, and demand a recount.
We already have good reason to suspect that the MSPP data are incomplete and drastically undercounted. This looks less like incompetence and more like fraud.
The sudden fall in Port-au-Prince cases and deaths demands an explanation from competent epidemiologists. If PAHO and the other agencies and NGOs can't supply that explanation, it's going to be hard to trust anything else they say.
