WUHAN VIRUS DAILY UPDATE FOR APRIL 25
WELCOME TO THE WEEKEND REPORTING WONDERS. Yes, just like how news agencies like to bury news by publishing it on Saturday, it seems a lot of government agencies like to perform their "truing up" on Saturdays as well so there won't be much blow back for their controversial decisions. For example, California now reports EVERY TEST. Well, if someone tests positive they always get a 2nd test to confirm. Califorina will report each of those tests - not the number of people tested and their outcomes. Maine also cleared up a 30k backlog today. Meanwhile AL, FL, GA, IL, NY, TN, TX all reported over 10k tests. Hopefully those are legitimate and show our new capacity coming online. In all we got 301,752 new tests reported which, despite the clearly poor reporting practices in some places, seems to also show a real promising move upwards. With the increased test rates we're seeing a drop in positives. It's been 16.7%, 14.08%, and 13.55% over the last three days. It's hard to say these are data anomalies or good news.
Deaths are also up today and we don't have a lot of details as to why. Is this part of the CDC's approval of widening what's considered a Wuhan-mortality or are we seeing the curves start to move up in many states? Arkansas hasn't seen a death in several days and got 2 - likely past due and real. Colorado really moved up with 122 new deaths for a total of 674. That's huge and either means a few nursing homes or prisons got wiped out or the state is claiming a lot of things as Wuhan-deaths that likely aren't. Will have to see how the CDC reports for total deaths for all causes comes out in their next report which I think happens at the end of the month.
For Saturday, rates of growth (rog) for new incidents is and deaths are higher. Our new total for incidents is 931,698 (+40,882 - on track for 1Million on Apr 27 rather than Apr 28th cause of the increase in tests), an increase of 4.59% over the previous day (+0.92% from yesterday). Deaths have totaled 47,980 (+2,194) which is an increase of %4.79 (+0.77%) over the previous day and on track for 50,000 tomorrow which is precisely what we predicted. Since the peak in Mar 19, rates of growth for incidents has fallen by 47.05% and for deaths has fallen by 38.07%.
We have two more days of data "truing up" - I like this word better than adjustments now because it seems to accurately reflect the desire by the reporting agencies for a certain outcome rather than ensuring that the data models reflect an accurate and useful assessment of what their measuring - before we start to see if anything useful can come out of the reporting. Stay tuned...