WUHAN VIRUS DAILY UPDATE FOR APRIL 14
NEW CURVES OR DATA CAPTURE LAGS? TERRIBLE TUESDAYS! Not surprisingly, our death totals jumped up today. I hadn't noticed before because I was focused on incidents which don't show this behavior - but it appears that lots of states aren't reporting deaths consistently each day, especially weekends and Mondays, so Tuesdays always jump up and then proceed to decline in rates of growth (rog) and now, even absolute numbers. This appears to be the biggest factor in today's larger numbers but it could also be an indication of new curves popping up in other hotspots and across America. We'll have a stronger level of confidence over the next two or three days.
The states really driving the numbers are, of course, NY, NJ, and Michigan. California's reporting is incredibly unreliable in terms of consistency in reporting data so have to view a longer trend for them. Other states having significant influence are CT, FL, MA, and OH. Good news is since the rog for incidents continues to drop (even a new low record today), we project so will deaths over the remainder of the week.
Given a total of 3,098,235 total tests completed in America, our new total for incidents is 602,473 (+25,699), up slightly to an increase of only 4.46% (a new record low ever!) over the previous day (-0.07% from yesterday!). Deaths have totaled 25,668 (+2,299) which is an increase of 9.84% (+3.22% rate of growth) over the previous day. Since the peak in Mar 19, rates of growth for incidents has fallen by 47.18% and for deaths has fallen by 33.02%. There were, again, only 146,070 tests completed at a time where we need more testing than ever.
There's more bad news in terms of our ability to collect consistent data - New York City recently announced that it is adding 3,700 deaths to their list of people who had never tested positive for Wuhan-virus but were presumed to have died of it. The CDC's own instructions apparently approve of this process stating "Ideally, testing for COVID–19 should be conducted, but it is acceptable to report COVID–19 on a death certificate without this confirmation if the circumstances are compelling within a reasonable degree of certainty." see: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvss/vsrg/vsrg03-508.pdf It's irresponsible to count something as a Wuhan-virus death if there hasn't been a test performed or the lungs haven't been opened up in an autopsy to confirm - but that's exactly what's happening.
It's clear that, due to the way government funds things, there's an incentive to over-report cases now. Of course - this will all be discovered quite clearly over the next year as we see all other causes of death dropping off because they were declared as Wuhan-virus deaths - but that will be way too late to have been useful in helping us drive policy to address this pandemic in a responsible manner. That's why this nonsense is so unethical and you can tell it's nonsense when it jars against the ratio of incidents so obviously.
We'll be watching closely at the other states for indications of new hot spots. But, until that happens, expect the trend to continue to decline as we projected earlier.