Fun with COVID-19 reporting in MA (and elsewhere)

The week of Thanksgiving 2020 we saw a slight dip in the case count from the preceding week (a 0.65% reduction... 2605 cases per day down from 2622 per day)... and then we saw a 78% increase the week after (4644 cases per day).  The Monday and Tuesday prior to Thanksgiving had more cases than any single day the week prior and that Friday had more cases than any but one day the week prior.  Thursday, shockingly, saw a distinction from the rest of the weekdays, with 445 cases (compared to the 2,944 to 3,791 cases each of the other weekdays had) Past is prologue, right?   With the case counts still ticking up, we see that the Monday last week had a higher single-day case count than any day going back through January 27, 2021, Tuesday had higher single-day case counts than any day going back through February 4, 2021, and Wednesday already has a higher count than all but 3 days from February 9, 2021 through November 14, 2021.  With days to go before the numbers settle down from last week, t

Just a friendly reminder that the residence-based settings are removed on account of, well, you can't really prevent spread within a place of living, so the effort has to be preventing it from spreading outside and coming in.  Notable this week:  Childcare reclaims its throne as the youth-related clusters race to see who will reach 1.5 times the rest of the non-residential settings combined (they've already surpassed 1 time the sum).  K-12 Schools' clusters continue to outpace on a per-cluster basis though.  Hospitals multiplied their spread by 1.5 and Other Workplaces nearly tripled theirs (though both were relatively low before so...). Child Tier Child Care - 249 clusters causing 457 cases  K-12 Schools - 93 clusters causing 426 cases  High Tier Social Gatherings - 38 clusters causing 96 cases  MediumTier Organized Athletics & Camps - 32 clusters causing 54 cases  Hospitals - 14 clusters causing 53 cases Colleges & Universities - 8 clusters causing 37 cases Indust

A note of explanation on the below data: each number is the outcome of taking this week's data, subtracting the data from 2 weeks ago, and dividing by 14 (to get the per day) and then dividing by the population of the location (to get the per person) and then multiplying by 100,000 (to get the per 100,000 people per day) Information closest to the city/town name is the most recent information and spans backward in time so that a comparison can be drawn of how we went from doing ok in the summer of 2020, to doing really badly over the winter, to doing really well in the spring of 2021, and then how we've done since.  We were able to get the spread down to "Low transmission" briefly in all but 2 regions while still in phase 3 of our re-opening plan (including multiple weeks in some regions and  for longer than a month  in 3 of the 14 regions) so beating COVID-19 is entirely possible, we just have to try as a wider community to get there.  Blue  - Less than 1.5 cases per