COVID-19 August 04, 2020

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.

COVID-19 August 02, 2020

It's been a busy week.  Apologies for the spotty posts.  Here are the data based on yesterday's numbers.  New infections are continuing to slowly drop, but remember we are still nearly double where we were when wave #2 began.  Deaths continue to increase.

COVID-19 July 31, 2020

No time for commentary today, but here are the pretty pictures.

COVID-19 July 30, 2020

The number of new cases has now clearly started to trend downward.  That's driven largely by the data coming from Florida, California, and Texas which were responsible for the bulk of the second wave.  However, there are still many states that are going up, up, up.  These smaller states are getting washed out. 

Deaths continue to increase.  If there's any good news, it is that in two weeks or so we might expect those numbers to level off and then start to decrease since there is (or should be) a direct link between cases and deaths. 

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.

COVID-19 July 26, 2020

A short post today because it's the weekend and I've got work, yard work, and BASEBALL to watch.  There's nothing really new anyway.  New infection rates continue to hold steady. Deaths continue to increase.  Your state may vary. 

COVID-19 July 25, 2020 : COLORADO SPECIAL

It's been a while since I did a "Colorado Special".  I figured this might be a good time, especially since decisions need to be made about sending kids back to school. 

The 7-day average daily infection rate is higher than ever in Colorado, and the trend indicates a continued increase.  Some caution needs to be exercised with this statement.  First, testing is much higher now that it was early on.  All other things being equal, the number of identified infections should go up even if the actual infection rate were the same.  At the same time, Colorado started reporting only confirmed cases (i.e., positive tests) rather than confirmed plus presumptive on April 25.  This is why there is a big discontinuity in the daily infection data at that date.  See the big downward drop?  I've circled it in red. Even so, it didn't take more than a couple of weeks for new infections to go above and beyond the numbers prior to the change.  I'll also add that I personally know some people in the state that have been waiting for almost three weeks to get test results.  Many that were infected weeks ago won't show up in the stats until the tests come back. 

Around May 5th, the daily infections began to drop fairly steadily.  We were in the height of the lock-down and it worked.  Then, around June 14 the numbers began to climb.  This coincides, roughly, with the loosening of restrictions.  Shocking, I know.  It's almost as if...as if science works.  Who knew?  Colorado numbers are going up even though the 7-day average for the country has stabilized in the last week.  Be careful with averages.  Even in Colorado, the trends in counties and cities can be extremely different. 

I'll make this point explicit:  Cases are increasing even though we haven't yet sent thousands and thousands of students and staff back into enclosed buildings for 7 hours per day.  You do the math.  If anyone is wondering, I'm keeping my high-schooler at home; he will be attending via an on-line school option.  I'm lucky that my school has provided this option.  We do have the option to send the kids back to school on a hybrid system that includes both in-class (50% of the time) and on-line (50% of the time) instruction.  I'm fortunate that I'm in a position to do the on-line option.  Not everyone can.  Some will be forced to send their kids into the grand petri dish experiment because they have to work or for other reasons.  Who will be held responsible if this all goes horribly wrong? 

The 7-day average death rate bottomed out around July 4.  It was darn near zero.  Since that time, the death rates have been climbing.  This is expected given the increase in infections and the lag between an infection and death.  As cases increase and hospitals begin to get filled again, deaths should also increase.  If there's any good news it's that medical professionals have learned a lot about how to best treat the infections with the tools at hand.  No doubt that many who would have died in March and April will survive because of improved treatment options.