Fun with MA COVID-19 Reporting 02-Jan-2021 edition

Cases:

So... just want to point out that it took us 296 days from our first case in MA (29-Jan-2020 to 19-Nov-2020) to get to 200,000 cases (technically we reached 200,752 that day).  Just 42 days later we're getting close to doubling that.  As of today's report, we were at 367,987, and that number will grow by over ten thousand by this time next week (more likely more than twenty thousand).  I suspect we'll cross the 400,000 cases mark by the 15-Jan. 

While the week of Dec 20 still appears to be seeing a downward trend for cases so we might have the second week of significant reduction, there are several reasons to be concerned and believe that this trend is not continuing past the week of dec 20.  The most obvious is how this past Monday now has the record for the highest single day increase with 8,137 new cases by a significant margin (and is still climbing) with the second highest single day being the preceding Monday which has somewhat stabilized around 6,449.  This past Tuesday, very much still climbing, is the third highest at 6,405... and it'll likely take the second highest crown tomorrow.  For another thing, the first five days of the week of Dec 27 currently have an average (4,436.2) slightly higher than the week of Dec 13 (significantly higher than Dec 20, 4,420.9 and 3,770.7 respectively).  We may see fewer cases come in on Thursday/Friday than the last couple weeks, and Thursdays have tended to have a much smaller case count recently (even lower than the weekend days on either side strangely), but it very much seems that this week will not see a continuation of the reduction in cases that we have seen the last 2 weeks.  The week of Dec 20 is still seeing increases daily but I suspect it won't reach an average of 4,000 cases per day.

On to deaths:

It took us 227 days from our first death (18-Mar-2020 to 30-Oct-2020) to reach 10,000 deaths.  We're not quite as close to doubling that as we are the cases.  Back in April/May we saw 48 days straight of 70+ people dying every day.  I suspect we saw another period of this sort start back on Dec 28.

Deaths have been steadily increasing since Oct 4 with 1 week outlier in that the week of Oct 4 had 13.3 deaths per day, Oct 11 had 20 deaths per day and then we came back in between with Oct 18 having 18.9 per day (and since then no single week had a lower death rate than the preceding week).  The week of Dec 20 had 61.7 deaths per day.

Hospitalizations:

You know it's been a bad week when the hospitalizations goes down significantly on the most recent day but the last 7 days still saw an 12% increase overall.  Thankfully, ICU cases only increased by 1.5% with 2 days of significant decreases.  Intubations, however, while decreasing significantly yesterday, increased by 6% in the last 7 days.  These increases are better than they were at the start of November but they are slightly worse than the 7-day review from a few days ago despite the decreases we saw on Jan 1.

Testing:

The state puts the highest concern on positive test rate, however, not on whether people are getting sick and dying or whether the hospitals are filling up.  But even measure shows us to be in a really bad place.  The state has said for the last couple months that a 4% positive test rate is bad for larger populations and 5% is bad for medium populations.... we've been below 5% since Nov 23 and haven't been below 8.5% since Dec 23 with more than half of those days being above 10%, twice the danger mark the state has provided.

Stay safe. Stay sane. Stay informed.