This Needs Fixin'

You should put a few minutes into reading Here’s the US Death Toll From COVID-19 Not Counting New York at Mother Jones.

It’s … not good.

They present a graph of the 7-day rolling average (a stat that’s good for smoothing) of COVID-19 deaths in a) the whole United States and b) the United States minus New York.

The first line is the one you may be familiar with, showing a slight but definite downward trend. It makes it look like we’re past the worst and can maybe start thinking about relaxing a bit.

The second, though, is definitely rising.

Really, really not good.

He questions the utility of removing the largest data point, which fair enough if you want to know about the state of the country as a whole; you can’t just drop data out and expect the picture to be realistic.

But if you want an idea of how things are going in most of the country, dropping New York out is really useful since its numbers are so large that they obscure the trendline for everywhere else.

And in this case, it means the rest of the country is still on the upslope.

You might go so far as to say that’s … bad?

I certainly would: it’s really bad.

With the general trend being a continued increase in COVID-19 deaths, it is absolutely guaranteed that increasing the level of contact between people now will result in a substantial upswing in infections.

So, regardless of what your local or State government are saying: now is not a safe time to resume public life.

With the recent rush to re-open everything, it’s going to keep getting worse.

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