COVID-19 July 15, 2020

This will be an important week.  I'm looking to see if there is any flattening of the curve in this second wave.  The doubling rate for new infections has been edging down ever so slowly.  At one point it was 15 days.  It is now closer to 17 days.  Not a big difference, but when dealing with exponential functions those small differences can be a big deal.  Mind you, cases are still growing exponentially.  It's just a matter of how big of an exponential growth.

You may have seen the news that hospitals will now be required to send their data directly to the Health and Human Services (HHS) Department rather than the Center for Disease Control (CDC).  Given the dishonesty and lies that spew out of the federal executive branch on a daily basis, there is a lot of suspicion that this change is intended to make cooking the books easier.  It is no secret that the President wants lower numbers in order to justify reopening everything.  I would urge everyone to remain cautious, but we should all be careful about inferring a conspiracy.  I am reasonably confident that if any funny business goes on the data will tell us.  There are statistical tests and other numerical methods for determining whether data fit within a pattern of prior information.  If the behavior of the data changes going forward we should be able to see that.  We'll just have to wait and see how things go.  As it is, the data and reporting has been inconsistent and problematic.  There is a slight chance things could get better.  I doubt it, but let's see. I am unsure how this change will affect my data source, if at all.  I have been using information from the State Health Departments that are aggregated daily on Wikipedia rather than the CDC or other institutions.