Author: chogan@directresearch.com

This is just a final set of state-level trend graphs through the last day of 2020.  At this point, you can see a clear Christmas artifact in the data reporting.  It’s a pretty good match, for depth and duration, to the reporting artifact that appeared just after Thanksgiving.

If I had to pick one word that has been over-used in reporting on COVID-19, it would be surge.  Seems like everything is a surge these days.  That notwithstanding, it’s too soon to start looking for any “post-Christmas surge” in cases.

As of the end of the year, it still looks like California has peaked, and that South in general is seeing a mix of slowly rising and slowly falling rates. Continue reading Post #934: COVID-19 trends through 12/31/2020

This is a post about the count of U.S. residents who have had a COVID-19 infection, but were never formally diagnosed.

To get to the bottom line, the answer is, lots.  There are lots of people who have had a COVID-19 infection but have not been diagnosed.  The number of actual COVID-19 infections is several multiples of the cases that have been formally diagnosed.  But if you want much more accuracy than that, I think you’ll be disappointed.  Particularly if you want a state-level estimate, instead of one for the U.S. as a whole. Continue reading Post #933: The CDC’s eight-times estimate.

With so much bad news in my face every day, it’s hard to tell what’s really dangerous from what’s just run-of-the-mill awful.   I get to the point where I just shrug stuff off if it doesn’t directly affect me and mine, here and now.

They’ve been having an exceptionally tough pandemic December in the United Kingdom.  New lockdowns, border with France closed, case counts rising.  And that has something to do with a new, worse strain of COVID.

But so what.  Things are tough all over.  How bad can it be, really? Continue reading Post #932: The new British strain of COVID-19.

Above:  Trend in new COVID-19 cases/ 100,000/day, my calculation from NY Times Github repository data reported through 12/29/2020.

• Black = already peaked, no longer a concern for “out-of-control COVID”.
• Green = stable rate, possible downward trend.
• Orange = stable rate, possible upward trend.
• Gray = California.

I’m sure you’ve been reading newspaper articles about the crisis in hospitals in Southern California.  I’m just here to point out what you’re not seeing:  Articles like that about anywhere else in the U.S.A.

And that’s because the state of the U.S. is pretty much as pictured above.  There’s California.  And then there’s the rest of the U.S. Continue reading Post #931: Simplifying the picture of COVID-19 in the US

In Post #925, I made the prediction that Tennessee was past its peak daily new infection rate.  That wasn’t based on any detailed analysis.  That was simply based on what had already happened 12 times before, in this pandemic, to states in a similar situation.

The only value-added here was in figuring out that this was the 13th time a state was in this situation, and then quantifying what, exactly, “this situation” was.

That was then:

This is now:

And I’d say that’s looking pretty good, prediction-wise.  So far.  Plus-or-minus a Christmas data-reporting artifact.

And sure, doctors bury their mistakes.  Meaning that people don’t brag on the times that they were wrong.  So if I’d screwed this up, it’s unlikely I’d be writing this post.  (Though I try to be as scientific as I can, announce things ahead of time, and admit when I am wrong.)

But there’s a reason behind this.  This wasn’t a lucky guess.  There’s a reason that Tennessee is the 13th in the series. It’s h*** i*******.  The condition that dare not say its name (Post #928).

And the exceptionally good news is, the same thing that gave me the confidence to call it for Tennessee tells me that the US, as a whole, is (probably) now over the hump on COVID-19.

In short, I think we’ve seen the worst of it.  And we’re starting to leave it in our rear-view mirror.

This is definitely something you won’t read in the mainstream press.  As the news coverage flits from peak awfulness to peak awfulness, state-by-state, try to keep your eye on the big picture.

And the big picture is, we’re over the hump.  It’s light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel time.  Maybe not for your particular state.  But for the US as a whole.

A few details follow.  But I’ll be fleshing this out in the next several posts. Continue reading Post #930: Odds are that the U.S. is over the hump, COVID-wise.

Source:  Plotted from data from the NY Times Github COVID data repository.  Data reported through 12/26/2020

Edit:  You can now see this clearly, with 20-20 hindsight, in (e.g.) Post #941.  The holidays do, in fact, put a significant dip in the reported infection count.

Holidays introduce several types of artifacts in the data on new COVID-19 cases.

There’s an immediate “reporting” artifact.  Many public health departments are short-staffed on the holiday, and they aren’t able to tabulate all the new COVID-19 test results that arrive on the holiday itself.  That creates a sharp one-day dip-and-rebound in reported rates.  We saw that at Thanksgiving, predicted in Post #901, confirmed just post-Thanksgiving in Post #909).  And, as above, we’ve now seen that same pattern for Christmas day.

There are other artifacts, but they will be more subtle than that, and harder to spot.  Presumably, there’s a slowdown in the actual rate of testing (because who goes out on Thanksgiving to get a COVID-19 test), and that shows up as a dip in the rates a few days later.  Finally, there’s the actual “surge” — if any — the actual increase in infections due to holiday travel and such, that shows up anywhere from 12 days to three weeks after-the-fact.

This post is about an odd discovery that I made when try to smooth out the Christmas reporting artifact, shown above.  The discovery is that there isn’t a simple offsetting dip-and-rebound in the reported rates.  The rebound isn’t as big as the dip.  There’s actually a small, permanent one-off reduction in the number of positive cases found, associated with that holiday day.  True for Christmas.  And, in hindsight, true for Thanksgiving as well.

It’s as if some people who would have tested positive just never bother to get tested.  Presumably, because of the holiday.  And never get tested afterwards, to make up for it.  Presumably because, eh, they probably don’t have a very bad case of COVID-19.  And so, apparently, just deal with their COVID infection.

This is no more than an odd footnote.  My real goal here was to talk about trends.  But, in fact, I just have to let the Christmas data glitches work their way through the system before I can talk about trends again.

A small amount of detail follows. Continue reading Post #929: An odd footnote on the post-Thanksgiving surge that never happened