COVID-19 Update - 05/29/2020

My own workup | 05/29/2020 | DoughtyOne

[DoughtyOne]

Thanks Amorphous.

[amorphous]

Thanks need to go to you for your hard work in keeping us updated. The little I contribute doesn’t begin to compare to the effort you’ve put into your well done reports.

[DoughtyOne]

Thank you, but I like when folks contribute things that
make the whole thing more useful.

Wish some folks would do the same instead of making fools of
themselves by complaining.

If a person sees something missing, they are free to add in
whatever they like that contributes to the project.

[mrsmith]

Thanks. Seems covid info gets less clear everyday though!Probably from conflating all of the US info together.

“First 42 coronavirus tests at Missouri hair salon all negative after 2 stylists test positive for COVID-19”
https://twitter.com/WCVB/status/1266465624634638337

Doubt the media will give this much airplay.

[amorphous]

Probably not. Maybe the stylists were wearing masks, which prevented the transmission to their customers?

Btw, in regard to our ongoing chats about what is the most accurate data; it seems CV is present in human waste and one of the most accurate indicators of its spread is to take samples from local sewer plants.

[mrsmith]

Gives new meaning to “viral load”...
Sewage testing is cheap and easy. I expect we’ll be set up to use it in time to watch for a ‘second wave’.

[amorphous]

Gives new meaning to “viral load”...

That it does...

[the_Watchman]

MMaschin: Why don’t you add to the graphs with your own data by demographic?

Which demographics would you use?

Oh, I see, you didn’t tell us. I guess that made your post “worse than useless”.

[the_Watchman]

Hi DoughtyOne. That is a very impressive amount of work you went through. I do have a few comments.

First, by way of process, why don’t you post this data during “waking hours”? I see that you have a large ping list, but I would have never found it if I hadn’t had a case of insomnia. :) Posting even early morning would tend to make it more browseable for normal folks.

Second, you seem to put what I consider to be too much concern over total number of cases. Actually, “total number of cases” is one of the weakest statistics since it is so easy to manipulate both accidentally and as a byproduct of normal processes.

Consider that if a geographic entity increases their testing, then they would expect the total number of cases to go up. I remember that during January there were almost no cases in Africa of South America. Nobody knew if that represented reality or if it just meant they had no test kits.

Early in the “pandemic” almost all tests were done only on symptomatic cases. This was due primarily to a shortage of test kits. Once governments decided to try general testing they found that the number of cases was far more than they suspected. On the other hand, the death rates were not nearly as scary since 80% of cases were asymptomatic.

What was of concern were the U.S. governors who wanted to tie reopening to “daily cases”. It was obvious that with most cases being asymptomatic, “daily cases” could be manipulated just by increasing the number tests conducted.

Internationally, there may have been many governments who just wanted the whole thing to blow away and avoided testing in order to keep their heads down. You just don’t know what these people are thinking, but they pollute the worldwide cases as they get drug into the testing scenarios.

Thus, there are a number of reasons why we cannot put a lot of stock into “total cases”, “daily cases”, “new cases”.

Hospitalizations and deaths are better statistics. There are a number of FR threads which discuss the difficulties of “deaths” since actual cause of death is typically not ascertained and many of the victims have a serious comorbidity. They have caught one state playing games with the death rate by citing the reporting date rather than the actual date of death.

Hospitalizations is probably the best data point which is not subject to planned manipulation. However, even with that, there have been municipalities short of hospital beds who decided to send some people home when they should have been admitted.

For the above reasons, I focus on daily death rates and current hospitalizations as the best statistics to follow.

My last point is that the projections by state on Worldometers shows a significant fall off of daily deaths/million in the U.S. by June 1. [Arizona, my state, starts going up on June 1, but that’s another thread. I wish I knew why.] These trends seem to show that the U.S. is clearly headed out of danger.

However, the raw data and graphs that you depict do not seem to reflect that strong fall off. I just wonder why that is the case.

There again, daily rates, are the thing to watch. Accumulated data over time is not easily processed by the mind. (Most people don’t do calculus derivatives in their heads.) A lot of people see accumulated figures going up and discount the “flattening”. With daily rates people see a number which should be trending toward zero.

[mrsmith]

The OP does excellent work.
There are problems with all metrics!
Deaths: serious lag, say a month.
Hospitalizations: changes in protocols for who is sent home to telehealth surveillance vs who is admitted. (telehealth is growing).
Cases: obvious effect of testing protocols.
ILI report from CDC: not exactly what we want.
Positivity rates of testing: again affected by testing protocols.
And, of course the big problem of independent ‘granular’ outbreaks.

Just have to look at the ‘big picture’.