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

Alright, so, let's start off with the good news: my prediction that last week would, by now, be known to have reached reached the average 1015.7 cases per day that we saw October 18-24 2020 did not come to fruition.... we currently have an average of 988.7 for last week.   So, that's the good news, right?  What about the bad news?  Well, while this is less than that week of October 18-24 2020, it also is 38% higher than the previous week (Jul 25-31 was 716 cases per day). This is good news of a sort, because the week-over-week increase percentages that we're seeing are slowing down.  We went from 124% to 81% to 50% and now may be as low as 38% (though it's likely that will creep up ever so slightly still). Ok, we had good news, we had bad news, we had good news... you know there's another shoe about to drop and here it is: Deaths this week have been 6-8 every day thus far.  The last time we saw 4 days that were higher than 5 deaths on each day was back in t...

Good news on the cases per day and deaths per day fronts... bad news on the hospitalizations and vaccinations front... Though we certainly have slowed our decrease in cases from what we saw a few weeks ago, they aren't slowing quite as quickly as I had been expecting at the start of the week.  I had expecting the week of 23-Jun-2021 to reach an average of 220 cases per day.  It now appears we won't reach that and may actually stay below 200, though just barely. Average new cases per day by week, then and now (and with per 100,000 people in parenthesis to bring in line with the outside MA and the more local reviews I've been doing): Week of 19-Apr-2020:  2118.4 (30.7) Week of 25-Apr-2020:  1773.0 (25.7) Week of 3-May-2020:   1405.9 (20.4) Week of 10-May-2020: 1073.4 (15.6) Week of 17-May-2020:   852.0 (12.4) Week of 24-May-2020:   498.3   (7.2) Week of 31-May-2020:   348.0   (5.0) Week of 07-Jun-2020:     239.6   (3.5) Week...

A quick bit of good news bad news: Good news, hospital use continues to fall. Good news, cases are continuing to fall. Bad news, the decrease in cases is reducing. Bad news, deaths reached their lowest 2 weeks ago and are now very very very slowly climbing.  Well, at least we had 1 week where we averaged below 10 deaths per day... 1 week in the 13 months. Oh, also, in the last 2 weeks, 6 kids under 15 (including at least 4 last week) have been hospitalized and 1 has died. Stay safe. Stay sane. Stay informed.

Technically, the week of March 28 represented a fourth week in a row of increased cases, but that week's increase was barely an increase. Week of Feb 28 daily average: 1,343.7 Week of Mar 7 daily average: 1,387.7 (only a 3% increase week-over-week) Week of Mar 14 daily average: 1,626 (17% increase week-over-week) Week of Mar 21 daily average: 1,962.7 (20% increase week-over-week) Week of Mar 28 daily average: 1,964 (0.06% increase week-over-week) So... Good news: the increase has slowed down...  Bad news: we're still nearly at the rates we were during our first peak (we reached 2,177.1 the week of Apr 12, 2020) Also... Good news: deaths per day are still declining Bad news: we were still seeing that hospital headcount, ICU usage, and intubations were all increasing as of the week of Mar 28.  Good news: hospital headcount appears to be either decreasing based on the first 5 days of this past week (the only days we have counts for)  Bad news: ICU usage and intubations are c...

A bit of a good news/bad news situation today. Good news: It looks like new cases may be on the decline.  The week of Nov 29 had a daily average of 4629, the week of Dec 6 had 4621, and the week of Dec 13 had 4419.  At this rate, we'll be back to first-wave peak numbers in... 10 weeks?  Back in May, we saw average cases per day decrease by about 350 week-over-week for a few weeks till we got down to the point of deciding to re-open at which point we immediately saw a reduction in that trend and within a month had pretty much stalled out.  We'll see what happens in the coming weeks.  I would also suggest we take the potential reduction in case counts with a bit of a grain of salt given that Dec 21 (Monday last week) has captured the highest single day increase crown and Dec 22 is the 5th highest and may well become 4th within a few days if it isn't bypassed by a day from this week. Bad news: The death rate is increasing rapidly.  The week of Nov 29 had a dai...

Update on yesterday's good news / bad news segment (spoiler, we now know last week was worse than we realized yesterday): Good news turned bad - It looked like we had leveled off but we have now seen more cases last week than the preceding weeks. Until now, you only had to go back to May 31 to find a week with more cases... now you have to go back to May 24. Bad news - Yesterday I pointed out the following comparisons where our daily average case count was approximately 330 people per day but it's now 358 (more than twice our low point back at the end of June when we had 156 as a daily average the week of June 28. Also, for further comparison, for the month of July, though we saw increasing cases throughout, we had an overall daily average of 218, and we started the month of August with a daily average of 276 for that first week. Bad news - we're still seeing slightly more people enter the hospitals than leave and slightly more people become intubated than get taken off and...

Good news / bad news time: Good news - we appear to have stopped increasing our daily case count and have been relatively steady (neither increasing nor decreasing) since August 30. Bad news - our average daily case count is approximately 330 people per day (more than twice our low point back at the end of June when we had 156 as a daily average the week of June 28. Also, for further comparison, for the month of July, though we saw increasing cases throughout, we had an overall daily average of 218, and we started the month of August with a daily average of 276 for that first week. Bad news - we're seeing slightly more people enter the hospitals than leave and slightly more people become intubated than get taken off and slightly more people enter the ICU than leave the ICU. Bad news - we continue to see an average daily death toll in the low teens. Stay safe. Stay sane. Stay informed.

It being 9/11, I would like to point out that we, in MA alone, have seen more than 3 times as many people die from COVID-19 as the USA saw on 9/11/2001. Good news: we saw a drop of 25 hospitalized patients yesterday. Bad news: In the last 7 days we saw an increase of 7 hospitalized patients. More bad news: In the last 7 days we've seen 0 change in ICU patients (and yesterday we saw an increase of 1) Good news: In the last 7 days intubated patients reduced by 3. Bad news: Yesterday was saw an increase of 1 intubated patient. More bad news: 54 people who have died in the last 7 days (though we can expect Wednesday's number to increase and Thursday's numbers have yet to be included in this tally). If you think I'm neglecting the fact that we've already seen that Tuesday has had the largest single day increase in confirmed cases since June 1, you'd be wrong... just that with the holiday weekend, that milestone doesn't mean quite as much... we should be patient a...