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

Continuing to see somewhat high COVID-19 spread in MA but maybe we had stopped the increase prior to Barbenheimer opening weekend?

... a year and a few months ago, the MWRA covid tracking site added a pair of graphs to show a limited time frame so it would be easier to see the trends because the all-time graph was too difficult to see based on the scope of measurements (both time and variation of amount of spread)... that was about 2 years into the pandemic. They set the new graphs to start with the time-axis at 1-Jan-2022 (though you can't see the readings until about a week in because the qty-axis caps at about 5,000 and we weren't that low as of the start of the year).   So... here's my question: when are we going to shorten the timeframe these more limited graphs are displaying again? If 2 years is far too many points and too much variability to read easily, is it perhaps reasonable to keep it to 1-year?   But then we wouldn't have the super-high readings from the third wave and would only see the last year's waves... like the one that peaked in late Dec/early Jan at a 7-day daily average j

Ok, so, Southern MA doesn't appear to have been quite as bad the curve as we may have thought it was based on 2 samples... it's still unfortunate that we get only 3 readings per week given that, if one of them is an abnormality it throws off our understanding of the situation on the ground much more drastically and this is really the only way we know what's happening with the spread anymore. Throwing in a couple comparison time points: 2020 for the first wave 2021 saw our lowest spread where we actually had a couple days when nobody died from COVID and had gotten down to single-cases per 100,000 people per day for a few days. And then there's the last month. We're not quite as bad as we were at the peak of the first wave but we're still depressingly far from what we accomplished in the past.

Yesterday, it seemed like we might be heading in the right direction in MA in terms of COVID spread... today... not so much. A reminder that about 125-150 copies/mL is roughly equivalent to 16 cases per 100,000 people per day which is the threshold to the highest category for level of spread that we have (not nearly the highest amount of spread but it was considered "red" and whatnot)... this is one of the problems with sporadic data points, it makes getting the true sense a little harder because you have natural fluctuations from day to day and when you don't see the day-to-day fluctuations, you don't know if what you're seeing is an outlier or the trend...

Quick MA COVID update: We've doubled our spread in the last 2 weeks... we're now roughly at 32 cases per 100k people per day equivalency based on wastewater tracking and higher than we've been since May. Remdiner: 16 cases per 100k people per day is the threshold to highest category of spread.

MA COVID-19 update: Well, that was short lived... based on the most recent data from wastewater in MA, we're back to 16 cases per 100,000 or slightly more... we were potentially under that threshold for just 1 week.