Fun with COVID-19 reporting in MA (and elsewhere)

So, first the amusing situation we find ourselves in where for the third straight day, there's an asterisk for the newly reported confirmed cases indicating that there was some sort of test reporting snafu, here are a large number of tests that are coming back from the past just now. Next, we'll go with the mediocre news: over the last 8 days we saw an overall reduction of 4 people being hospitalized.... this is mediocre because back in May and June, we were seeing most days having double-digit reductions of 20 or more and only periodic increases, as in from May 16 through June 29, we saw 6 days over those 44 that had increases... and the overall count reduced by 1,864 for that time period or roughly 42 per day. So, a small decease over the last week but not a meaningful one. Similar situation for ICU and intubations where we saw a decrease of 1 and 2 respectively whereas we used to see a decrease of more than a couple every single day rather than 1 or 2 every 8 days. Ok, now t...

Deaths... ok, so, June 22, we re-opened for indoor dining. Almost like clockwork, 12 days later on July 3 we started seeing the average daily cases increase. Deaths is a further lagging indicator and one would expect them to start increasing a couple weeks after cases increased. Low and behold, the 3-day average looks like it may have reached it's low point between July 12 and July 22 and now, we see sustained higher averages for the last week (keep in mind that we will see those numbers grow). We never saw a day with fewer than 8 people dying (and that day was within the time window that we can expect to see the number increase in coming days).... think on that for a moment, in MA, we very likely will have had over 10 people die each day between March 26 and ... some time... maybe next year? I mean, it's a far cry from the hundred to two hundred that died each day from April 8 through May 15, but still. We could have strived for at least one day with nobody dying from COVID-19...

The state decided to point out that "a technical reporting error by a hospital group caused a delay in its laboratory test results being reported to DPH. These newly reported test results have been included in today's dashboard report and are reflected in today's totals." Yep, that's fine, I have no trouble understanding that the 356 new confirmed and 146 new probable cases yesterday and the 304 new confirmed and 110 new probable cases today are not representative of the last day or two of cases... that's always been the case... the state finds out about new cases each day for the previous weeks and months, typically getting fewer new information as you get past 2-3 weeks back. That said, the count of new cases per day for the last 2 days jumped up by more than 90 per day and by over 100 for the previous day, bringing the now-known totals to 322 new cases on Monday, 193 new cases on Tuesday, and 95 cases on Wednesday... and these counts will likely continue to...

There have been 5 days where there have been over 350 new confirmed+probable cases in the last 6 weeks... they've all come in the last 3 weeks (and the cases per day from this week and last week continue to grow and the 3 days that are not above 350 from last week are pretty close to it... 336, 338, and 345). Also, there was a single week back in June where no day saw more than 300 new cases. Well, that was nice while it lasted. We are nowhere near doing well in MA. Stay safe. Stay sane. Stay informed.

Great news everyone, the COVID-19 average daily new cases for the week of July 19 increased by 35 cases per day so it looks like we may not need to wait for them to stabilize to see the third week in a row of increased daily cases. And the 7-day weight average positive molecular test rate that is the top measure for the state of how we're performing (though it really shouldn't matter to anyone given the variability of testing) has reached 2% again for the first time since June 18.... but hey, that's their own preferred stat so it going up surely shouldn't matter to them, right? Can we stop pretending MA is doing ok and roll back to phase 2a or earlier so we get things back under control before college students move ba... oh, right, too late for that, well... can we just roll back to phase 2a? In more local news, Somerville had a "decrease" in new cases. Before you start questioning my sanity and saying "but Peter, how did Somerville luck out like that, su...

Ok, so, great news everyone, we dipped down to 0 hospitals using surge capacity on the 26th... sadly we're back up to 4, or pretty much the average number since the start of June. Real progress is being made now on that front, it's fantastic. On the cases front, we see increase in cases on a given day rise dramatically for about 14 days and then stabilize a bit thereafter... though they still fluctuate around 1-2 on any given day for a while thereafter. That said, if take the averages for each week, we saw the lowest average the week of June 28th, then an increase from that for the week of July 5, then a further increase for the week of July 12.... the average for the week of July 19 is as high yet... but that's only 4-11 days ago and the average increased by 10 per day just between yesterday and today. Really, we're not doing well anymore in MA. Stay safe. Stay sane. Stay informed. Stay mathy.

Today's 4pm report came out just before 9:25pm The Number of Hospitals using Surge Capacity graph is identical to yesterday's (ie, we don't have new information on hospitals for July 22 yet apparently?) Yesterday the 7-Day Weighted Average Positive Test Rate for July 21st was 1.8% and today it is listed as 1.7%... which in and of itself is not surprising (the number does fluctuate for a few days) but what is surprising is that today the July 22nd rate is 1.8% and the graph line is horizontal from the 21st to the 22nd. Daily confirmed+probable cases on July 13 is the highest we've seen since June 9 (and is still within the 14 day window where we should expect to see increases) While we don't know how many hospitals are using surge capacity as of July 22, we do somehow know that there were only 351 people in hospitals at the end of the day on July 22, which marks the biggest decrease in over a month (181 fewer patients, where we typically see low double digits in eith...

Great news everyone, MA only saw 290 new hospital admissions yesterday. This is the 8th lowest number of new hospitalizations in the last 11 days! And as a result, we only saw overall hospitalizations go up by 19... that's the smallest increase in 2 days! And only 6 hospitals are using surge capacity... which, sure, is a three-way tie for the highest number in nearly 2 months but is still lower than it was steadily prior to June 1st.... you know, progress.... how's that for positivity? Can we be done pretending that MA is doing a good job now?

So, this morning, the news announced with glee that we only had 1 death yesterday from COVID-19. I went into an explanation of why this is misleading in a post earlier today but need to point out something about it now that I went back and looked at yesterday's report from the state: On July 6, the state changed the report so that the front page only shows the deaths among "confirmed cases" rather than the confirmed plus probable cases. Yesterday's report has 1 death reported in both the confirmed category and the probable category. The fact that the news is only reporting what is in the cover page is to be expected and just highlights a reason to be concerned with the obfuscation being performed by the state regarding our true situation. The glossy cover page that makes you feel good is not the true situation and the effort to make that glossy cover page look even better is .... disconcerting to say the least, though completely expected. Stay safe. Stay sane. Stay in...

To anybody who is watching the news in MA today and hearing "1 new COVID-19 death yesterday" and thinking this is good news, I provide the following ice cold shower: There was a day in June where we had 0 new deaths reported, remember that? Go look at the data now. Don't see it? It was June 30th. We had 16 deaths on June 29th, 15 on June 30th, and 23 on July 1. The daily death count isn't really known for days after the date since knowledge of the deaths keeps coming in. Death is the laggiest of lag indicators. This means that the situation that causes the death is the furthest back. So... let's say the state re-opens for indoor dining (one of the riskiest of behaviors per research) on Day 1 and that the restaurants and all the people who dine in start that change in behavior all at that time point (not realistic, you should probably give them a few days to a week, especially with Day 1 being on a Monday), you can expect to see people starting to show symptoms Day...

Remember how yesterday I commented on someone saying that there was a 1.4% positive test rate and said it was great news cause it was the lowest we've seen? Well, turns out they were talking about Tuesday's rate and Wednesday's rate was 2%. Also, the 3 day weighted average continues to hover around 1.7%. And the same person is saying today that there was a 1.1% rate, which, I certainly hope comes out in tomorrow's reporting data, I mean, right now we have a 0% rate in the data so..... anyway, that would be great because then the 3-day average would be 1.5%, which is clearly much lower than the 1.7-2.0% 7-day average we've seen since June 18th. There is good news on the hospital front, however, because while we continue to see 6 hospitals using surge capacity (yep, still higher than any other day in the last month except Tuesday) and continue to see new hospitalizations above 300 (we had been below this for a couple days and have been hovering around that mark since ...

Ok, it appears I need to come out and say this as a disclaimer: yes, I think the Baker administration is trying to re-open to fast and trying to obfuscate things and muddy the information out there in order to make the re-opening look better than it is. Why is that? I mean, it could be as innocent as a concern over the economy and the fact that we're not going to see assistance from the Federal Gov (which has much greater capacity for deficit spending) or it could be that the Governor is trying to appease the President or he could be trying to appease the Open It Up crowd. This is not a conspiracy theory. This is simply acknowledging that there are pressures on the Governor beyond trying to rid us of this disease... and I choose to believe that the Governor is intelligent and bowing to one of the above pressures (or a combination of them) rather than believing that he's too stupid to understand that we need more time at each phase to understand the result of our change in risk ...

Did anybody else notice that, because the counties are always shown in the same color, we can see that one of the mid-tier counties (in terms of COVID-19 rates) nearly doubled the number of COVID-19 cases between yesterday and today, going from 752 per 100,000 people to 1,327.... no, wait, that's just a mistake somewhere between the data and the graphic (each county increased its case count by less than 10%). Also strange things include that the number goes DOWN for 2 of the counties even though the numbers in the data don't do this. Oh, and Essex went from 2,053 to 2,076 to 2,062 to 2,065 over the last few days even though the data shows new cases each day. Glad they're being careful with this report. Also, how can we have 300 cases where we don't know what county the case is in?!? Stay safe. Stay sane. Stay informed. Stay wtf-ing.

For the second day in a row, the 7-day weighted average of positive test rate for July 7 went down... and great news, the July 8 average went down too... we're doing so well with testing that our past is getting better at it. Oh, and just to point out how the statement about looking at the last 45 days as a graph and then having a percentage decrease from the height of our cases as a number at the end is problematic again... the number of hospitals using surge capacity was 4 45 days ago and is at 4 today. In between it's been bouncing between 1 and 5. But have no fear because there's that great -81% at the end of the graph that we can report on. Stay safe. Stay sane. Stay informed. Stay I-still-have-no-idea-what-to-call-the-first-part's-nonsense. Stay graphic designy.

I just noticed a couple things about the daily and cumulative confirmed and probable cases that I had missed previously: the text says that it "includes both confirmed and probable cases" but the number in the graph for each day is the number of confirmed per the raw data, so even though the image shows the different elements, the numeric value isn't. The other thing I noticed? The data is current as of 10am that day... how much massaging do we need to do of this data to make it look good? Also, the state has adjusted the layout of their report so that probable cases are now a random page near the end (page 21 of 27). Oh, while we're on the topic of graphic design choices that can be misleading: the graph of Percent of Tests by Molecular Method that are Positive by Test Date has a peculiar thing where the first number is close to the line but almost all the rest are halfway between the line and the bottom of the graph. This means that in yesterday's report, the ...

In the map of prevalence by country, have you noticed that the same counties always make up the lowest bar which has a range of about 120-150 and then the second set of counties has a range of 440 and the third a range of 350? but the jump from the first to the second group appears to be around one tenth to 4... until yesterday when it's negative 5.6.... yes, you read that right, one of the low bar counties has a higher rate than one of the second lowest bar counties. I went to take a look at the data and it Hampshire is likely the 287.4 value, though I'm not 100% sure as I don't have the population count the state is using for their denominator. Yeah, so, the map's shading is ... misleading to say the least... even if it's just by accident. Stay safe. Stay sane. Stay informed. Stay graphically designy?

Our numbers continue to appear to be relatively stable after 7 days. Meaning that if you look past 7 days into the 45 day window for new cases, we tend to see fluctuation of -2 to 2 overall change to that particular date's count of new cases. The above makes it that much more concerning that yesterday we uncovered 113 new cases from over 45 days ago that we didn't know about before. If the first comment means we can reasonably expect that the number of new cases found 7 days ago are relatively static and can be seen as "true" (ie, on July 1, we would look at Jun 24), then we've seen that on weekends we have 70-100 new cases each day and on weekdays, with 2 exceptions in the last 2 weeks, 200-260 new cases per day.... compared to the fewer than 30 new cases per day that we saw when we initially closed restaurants and bars (in the teens in the days leading up to that announcement, 26 on that day). Jun 29 to Jun 30 changes in "health indicators" that should...