Apologies again for my inability to post daily. I do have a day job. This is all mostly morbid and self-preserving curiosity, but I don't get paid for it.
Back when the Feds ordered a change in data reporting I noted that the data itself would likely show if there was any funny business. Well, I'm not saying there's funny business, but things don't look quite right. It could be real. It could be data problems not related to the CDC circumvention, or it could be monkeying around. I can't tell, and either can you. At least not yet. I'm loathe to initiate or validate conspiracies, but I think some skepticism is warranted.
New cases reported over the last two days were down. This is consistent with the general downward trend that's been established for well over a week, and it's also consistent with the weekly oscillation, which is usually near the bottom on Sunday and Monday. What's shocking is just how down it is. It's a very large drop that appears to my eye to be out of family with pretty much all the data since this mess began. Yesterday's total came in at 41,963. The day before it was 53,561. It's been a month since numbers have been that low, and the drop from the max is far faster than anything we've seen.
Digging into the numbers and individual states a bit more, I went straight to Florida, Texas, and California since these "big three" have been driving the numbers of late. Texas is on the decrease, but the numbers don't appear to be too out of place compared to the previous week. For example, last week they bottomed out with 5,810 and 4,267 compared to this week's 6,226 and 5,303. Both this week and last week are down compared to the prior weeks, but this week doesn't stand out as being anomalous compared to last week. The same goes for California. It's down, but not in any obviously odd way compared to the prior week.
And then there's Florida. Yesterday's number came in at 4,752. I've cautioned before about looking at individual daily numbers by themselves. That missive still holds. But, let's compare that number in the context of the prior number from a week ago: 8,892. It's down by almost a factor of two compared to last week. In fact, Florida hasn't reported a number this low since June 23.
If I then move to some of the other smaller population states, I start to see at least some things that jump out at me. Tennessee is somehow down by something over 50% in a week. Arizona, down by something like 50%. Missouri, down by 40-50% depending on how you do the accounting. And so on, in several other states. It just looks odd. Could be real. Or not. I think we need to wait and see how things continue to trend and then wait for an explanation from those that do this sort of thing for a living.
Deaths have shown a similar, large drop over the last couple days. It's a bit unexpected, but compared the amplitude of prior oscillations it's large but not necessarily unrealistic. It has caused the 7-day average to drop noticeably over the last two days. Death numbers are harder to fudge than infections, but it's not impossible. All it takes is a reclassification of a COVID death to be something else. The dead are almost always counted, but not necessarily properly binned.
What's driving the drop in deaths? To start with Texas failed to report at the end of the day on August 2. From a statistical standpoint, that shows up as a zero. I might have expected yesterday's number to come in higher to account for that non-report, but it didn't. Where did those deaths go? Will they show up in the next few days? That's a lot of dead people gone missing. If I were to add back in a couple hundred deaths to Texas, things start to look more consistent with the prior trends. The numbers for Florida are down for the last two days (as expected due to the oscillation) and are comparable to where they were a week ago. Same with California. So, this could all be a statistical aberration. But, at some point, we should be asking to where the Texas dead disappeared.
