Fun with MA COVID-19 Reporting 10-Nov-2020 edition

Ok, well... last week's cases keep climbing and we now see...

  • There is no weekday that saw fewer than 1848 cases...for comparison,
    • There was no day from May 21 through October 18 that saw more than 1,000 cases
    • There was no day from May 5 through the start of last week that saw 1848 cases
  • Wednesday and Thursday currently sit at 2119 and 2291 cases respectively.  To get close to these number, you have to go back to April 29 which has 2187.  To get close to 2291, that's going back to April 24 with 2277 or April 23 with 2406.
  • The average case count is now at 1620.3.  I realized today that I've been counting back toward April and have to ask, why am I not counting forward from when we closed down originally... or counting the number of weeks/days that reached the current average?
    • We closed on March 17.... 
      • we had 31.8 cases the preceding week
      • March 17 itself saw 249 cases
    • reaching 1620.3?
      • Sunday-to-Saturday averages only have 4 weeks greater than 1620.3... those start April 5.
      • Any-7-sequential-days averages: April 3 through April 29 are the only days that reach this level, so we've only EVER seen 27 days that started a 7-day sequential average reaching this high.
But sure, Gov Baker, we're doing well and everybody should feel like they're in the yellow and not in the red.

Oh, and I noticed something about the report today while looking at how the hospitalizations have continued to climb.... the report no longer shows the hospitals that are using surge capacity.  Can't imagine why that might be bad optics for the state... oh, maybe it's because our hospital use has increased 41% from 436 to 618 since the start of November.  Our ICU headcount has increased by 74% and intubations have increased by 45% in the same time.

Deaths last week have reached an average of 19.7, just .1 away (or a total of 1 death across the entirety of the week) from matching the only other week to get this high since June 20. 

But surely cases, hospitalizations, and deaths don't matter as much as the positive test rate of all tests (not the positive test rate of individuals getting tested because that would likely be too high to obfuscate), right Baker?  Baker's new color coding suggests that 4% positive test rate is high and would put large cities in the high risk category so by his own estimation, that's a measure that should be considered... MA as a whole has now reached this with it's 7-day weighted average (now at 4.42%).  But that just means that we should all go to bed earlier, right Baker?

Stay safe. Stay sane. Stay informed. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

MA Wastewater Tracking (23-Jan-2024 data)

Image
See that little uptick at the end of each graph? This didn't happen in 2022 but did in 2023. We understood the goal in 2022 (to some degree) but since ... is there some portion of the population who says "covid spread must be down so let's go nuts"? I suspect this is partially colleges reconvening their students on campuses where in 2022 they were still trying to get their students to maintain some precautions and they haven't been since... but I also don't think this is just college campuses.
Read more

Fun with MA COVID-19 Reporting 02-Nov-2020 Edition - NEW LAYOUT IN THE REPORT!

THERE'S A NEW REPORT LAYOUT! (there will be a separate post about current counts/prediction follow up) It's always interesting to see a new layout because it gives insight into what the state's priorities and story-telling is.  Today's layout shows that they continue to be either sloppy with their design OR they want to try to confuse people by putting deaths and turn-around time for test results under the same heading line, similar to how all testing/cases are under one and how all information on hospitalizations are under a second line. We now have an "average age of deaths"... but we don't have which average it is, whether it's mean, median, mode, or whether it's overall or for the newly reported or the last 7 days or last 14 days or any kind of detail around it.... same with the new "average age of cases that were hospitalized". They're no longer showing the percent of individuals tested testing positive and only showing the perce...
Read more

MA Wastewater Tracking (27-Dec-2023 data)

Latest wastewater numbers from Biobot indicate that covid spread in MA continues to be basically a vertical line going up and reaching higher than it has been since January 22, 2022 (yes, 2 years ago). Why is this exactly as expected? Because as we continue to proclaim that all is fine, people will act as if it is and the annual surge in cases during the winter will increase accordingly. The 7-day average from 27-Dec-2023 suggests a spread level of 280 cases per 100,000 people per day (for comparison, original highest threshold level was 8 cases per 100,000 people per day, which was then relaxed a couple times to try to avoid shutting down every school and business and landed on 25 cases per 100,000 people per day.... so 280 is .... not great)
Read more