Today, it edged up to 1.18 and outside New York it edged up to 1.22
As a reminder, this is the ratio of cumulative deaths as of today to that as of three days ago. The goal is to spot a dramatic drop in the spread rate as of a few weeks ago. My thinking is that testing protocols change too often to use reported cases as an indicator. But increasingly we read that reporting protocols for Covid deaths are variable. Some experts want to try to compute “excess deaths” by comparing each week to an average of the same week in past years. That is not a task that I want to take on.
Following the trend in the 3DDRR, I was much more optimistic two weeks ago than I am today. I want to see the ratio drop to something like 1.002, and it looks like it is going to take a long time to get there.
Arnold, since you have identified/suspected reporting anomalies tied to the day of the week, how about switching to 7DDRR? The 3DDRR measure would be better if reporting variation were mere noise, but otherwise 7DDRR does better to control for what we are observing.
More generally, it might be worth posting trends in nDDRR for various n (say 2, 3, 5, 7, 10, 14) and see if the trends are robust or highly dependent on the chosen measure.
Someone last week did this in a blog post and linked to it- created a 7DDR- it was much smoother and less noisy. The weekend reporting effect is significant here and in Europe.
Here, Blink.
amen.
Arnold, it’s over. Most people that pretended to know something relevant and were eager to persuade (often to intimidate) others to follow their directives are becoming irrelevant. Politicians will increasingly follow the masses (Trump has already started).
I suggest reading
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-well-live-with-coronavirus-11587595308?mod=hp_opin_pos_2
I like this sentence
“We’ve all had a crash course in the uncertain nature and limitations of scientific knowledge.”
“We’ve all had a crash course in the uncertain nature and limitations of scientific knowledge.”
It seems to me we’ve taken this “limitations of experts” crash course about a dozen times now, because we keep forgetting the lesson, and fail to do anything meaningful with what we’ve learned while we still remember it.
What if difficult of the experts failed here is I bet most experts would more than happy to tell you what they don’t know. That is the worst problem with the Trump press conferences in that President Trump should only attend once a week and let the doctors have the other six days to review data and take a few questions.
The goal is to spot a dramatic drop in the spread rate as of a few weeks ago.
Outside New York, Louisiana, and Washington the evidence is weak of dropping cases and our state can single-handlely threw off case and testing data every week with the limited laboratories we have. (So the news is not good but it does seem like CA could back date the test and case data here.) Note,all states show a defined lumpiness in the day of the week data so it is best to assume a 7 day average because there is always a surprise Tuesday or Wednesday.
1) The most obvious reality is the New York numbers are getting better so their portion of US data is dropping while other states are increasing. The most obvious are the Midwest states that had limited cases.
2) The cases are not dropping as three suspects locations are suspects here senior facilities, jails and meat packing plants. Once introduced, coronavirus just spreads in these locations.
3) The lack of consistent data simply comes from the medical facilities and laboratories were not prepared for the crisis needs. Why is California data so lumpy? Limited medical laboratories.
4) Considering this is a crisis there should be more leeway of experts and local officials etc. But a lot of these problems would be improved with a focused administration. (That said they would be 20 – 30% better but still not perfect.)