Fun with MA COVID-19 Reporting 15-Jul-2020 edition

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 tolerance.

Alright, with that disclaimer out of the way, on to the "fun"

You remember how this morning the news said that yesterday we saw our first 3-day average of <10 deaths? Yeah, that didn't last long. The problem is that death and new case figures keep coming in for days, so where yesterday we knew of 3, 5 and 5 deaths on the 10th, 11th, and 12th respectively, we now know of 9, 10 and 14 respectively, so the average for yesterday which was down to 8, is now at 12. And today's average is already at 11. These would still be good progression if it keeps up, but it's a lot closer to the 17-23 we've been bouncing between since June 26. Yeah, since JUNE 26 WE HAVEN'T SEEN A REDUCTION IN AVERAGE DEATHS. If you go back 30 days, we do see a slight reduction... since back then we were bouncing between 22 and 31.

Our 7 Day Weighted Average has also adjusted since yesterday so that yesterday's 1.6% is back up to the 1.7% that we've now had for 4 days straight.... for whatever that's worth since we're moving our focus on testing around to different areas.

Oh, and we're back up to 6 hospitals using surge capacity which is the most we've seen in over 37 days. This, while not seeing a dramatic uptick in hospitalizations (so we're near our limit of non-surge capacity at multiple hospitals). The good news here is that in the last 45 days we've seen a drop in hospital use from over 1,500 to just shy of 600. The bad news is that we've pretty much stopped that decent at this point. In the last 7 days we've seen a decline by only 23. In that time, we haven't really seen an uptick in new hospitalizations, mind you, so people are now staying longer in the hospital than they were prior to 7 days ago it would seem. I suppose the good news is that the number of intubations and used ICU beds do continue to fall, though, again, not nearly as they were doing 14+ days ago.

Stay safe. Stay sane. Stay informed. Stay mathy. And stay cognizant of how reporting on the last couple days is actually not reporting good intel when it comes to new cases and deaths.