COVID-19 July 28, 2020

I wasn't able to post yesterday, so this entry covers two days.  Nothing much has changed.  The number of new cases each day remains flat and deaths are increasing.

I've had a number of questions about the time of the flattening curve vis-a-vis the change in national policy with the CDC.  I see no evidence that there is anything funny going on and it appears to be coincidence.  That doesn't mean numbers aren't being fudged in some way by the feds. It just means there's no obvious evidence.

I obtain my numbers from an aggregation of data reported by the state health departments and not from the federal government, at least not directly from the feds.  I don't actually  know the exact path that the data takes in getting to each of the state health departments.  My suspicion is that in most cases individual hospitals and testing centers report either to their county or directly to the state.  Then, counties report to the state.  It could be that hospitals and counties report to the federal government and then the feds distribute that data back to the states.  That would a rather convoluted path, but since we're talking about the government anything is possible even though it's unlikely.  When I randomly dig into the state health department web sites, it looks to me like they are getting their data from the bottoms up and not from the top down.

While conspiracy theories about federal interference are bantered about I think it is more important to recognize that it is far more likely that numbers are being cooked at the state level.  There have been credible reports of issues in Florida, for example, and these date back for months.  Still, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.  I do my best to avoid conspiratorial thinking in favor of the more usual culprits: stupidity and incompetence.  In other words, Hanlon's Razor.   Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. 

When I first started tracking numbers I reviewed a good number of data sources.  That includes Johns Hopkins, Worldometer, and other popular places people seem to go for data.  I've posted on this previously and discussed why I went with the source I did.  I intentionally avoided the federal government as a source of data, because it was clear from the outset that they were not up to the job because of failed leadership that begins at the very top.

I do believe the number of daily infections has leveled off on average.  I don't know that it will stay that way.  The current numbers are dominated by just a few states with large populations.  Other, less populous states are still rising (e.g., my state of Colorado), but it takes a whole lot of those to overcome the inertia of the big states.  On the local and state level there are a lot of places in a whole lot of trouble regardless of what the national averages may say.  See Simpson's Paradox, which I've also previously discussed.