About this Morning's (21-Jul-2020) News

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:
  1. 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.
  2. 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 5-15, and then die a few weeks after that. This means that even if we're seeing a decrease in deaths right now, that's not as good an indicator of what we're doing in comparison to the new cases.
  3. Speaking of new cases and lagging indicators. I did the math out again on the data yesterday and 2 weeks after MA re-opened is still showing as more new cases per day on average than the preceding 3 weeks (and this is prior to the new cases coming from July 4 would come in).
Stay safe. Stay sane. Stay informed. Stay aware that we're in trouble so you can act and plan accordingly.

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