Fun with MA COVID-19 Reporting 12-Aug-2020 edition

First, let me say that if you are having mental health issues related to hearing how bad things are, I'm sorry and you should feel free to walk away from my feed. It is partially for my own mental health that I am posting these alerts. That said, I was tempted to walk away from it for a little while given some of the recent interactions I've had related to the issue of others' mental health.... but today's report... jeez... I'm sorry, I gotta rant about it a little, cause it's not about the bad news but rather the change to the reporting (ok, it's a little about the bad news).

Let's start with the weekly report. Bad news: Somerville's 14-day count of new cases increased from 37 to 40... this is not significant and relatively minor, but continues a bad trend line. Good news: the state considers our incident rate to be green, which they consider to be low enough to warrant drastically increasing the risky behavior. Better news: we don't care and are not moving forward with opening public schools (thank you city leadership).

Daily report time... and this is just... ugh... really? We are apparently no longer tracking the probable cases... like, at all. They're no longer tracked in the report and they're no longer in the data being provided to sort of show their work. So... time to recalibrate all the mathyness I've been working through. Ready?

Average new confirmed cases per week:
  • Jun 28 - 155.7
  • Jul 05 - 199.1
  • Jul 12 - 212.2
  • Jul 19 - 222.1
  • Jul 26 - 290.8
  • Aug 2 - 268.1 (up from 257.5 yesterday... yeah, that caveat about the last 14 days still seeing lots of updates still exists).
Yep, still bad.

I do appreciate what they did with the second page though... now we're comparing against Lowest Observed Value. This means we're no longer seeing on the second page that we're down 91% from a bad point that was 4 months ago.

What's fascinating to me about the change on the second page though is that it's the reverse direction from what they've done elsewhere in the report. It makes us look worse to realize that 3 more hospitals using surge capacity and saw 9% more deaths than the lowest number of deaths seen... whereas the removal of probable cases (but not suspected hospitalizations because that would be HUGE or probable deaths, which one would be excused from noticing since they are so small a portion of the overall count) is to avoid showing those large numbers that you can see from my previous post. We recalibrate the graph of daily cases so the top line on the graph shows 450 vs the 600 it showed yesterday for daily cases and 114,000 vs the 122,000 it showed yesterday for cumulative cases. Yep, the graphical representation is everything... and 446 new cases in a single day looks far better than 542... especially if you're not paying attention.

Oh, btw, hospitalizations grew by 35. The last time that we saw a decline by the same amount on a given day, not counting the single day decline when we changed the definition, was July 16.

Stay safe. Stay sane. Stay informed. Stay graphical designy.

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