Coronavirus Outbreak

[mike]

Numbers are all still improving. The recent hiccups in the downward trends apparently have to do with reporting lags over the president's day holiday, the power outages in Texas, and other things.

[mike]

Here are the 6 US states that have had over 1,000,000 cases of COVID-19.



Of these six, California has seen the lowest death rate, followed closely by Florida and Texas.

It's interesting that California and Florida are similar in terms of number of cases and deaths relative to their populations, while they apparently have had very different approaches to mitigating the virus.

[Robert]

The Covid tracking project is shutting down in 5 days. The Atlantic is who was behind it. While I appreciate the work, I wonder why they chose now. I read their statement that they planned to do it for a month at first then it became a year and March 7 is the anniversary of that year. Since The Atlantic is so political, I immediately suspect it has to do with the incoming admin and they not wanting to track things. This is just an assumption and may be unfair. Maybe there was some altruistic purposes, but it makes me question of some of the interpretation they did would be slanted. Yes, they had to interpret data. That always leaves room for human ... error.

I think it has worked well enough for us to get a picture though, so we can be appreciative of the work that was done.

[Dan Z]

The Covid tracking project is shutting down in 5 days. The Atlantic is who was behind it. While I appreciate the work, I wonder why they chose now. I read their statement that they planned to do it for a month at first then it became a year and March 7 is the anniversary of that year. Since The Atlantic is so political, I immediately suspect it has to do with the incoming admin and they not wanting to track things. This is just an assumption and may be unfair. Maybe there was some altruistic purposes, but it makes me question of some of the interpretation they did would be slanted. Yes, they had to interpret data. That always leaves room for human ... error.

I think it has worked well enough for us to get a picture though, so we can be appreciative of the work that was done.

I think they served an important purpose at the time.

Government bureaucracy (under any party) is notoriously slow to ramp up - and the CDC was no exception at the beginning of the pandemic. The CDC reporting (as well as state and local reporting to the CDC) is now much more robust, thorough, and timely than it was at the beginning - eliminating the need for the Covid Tracking Project. The project is now encouraging folks to go to the CDC for data.

[Robert]

Government bureaucracy (under any party) is notoriously slow to ramp up - and the CDC was no exception at the beginning of the pandemic.

In their blerp, they said the did not trust the numbers coming from the government. Now they do. In round about words.

They did provide a good tool, but now I question some of it.

[Dan Z]

Government bureaucracy (under any party) is notoriously slow to ramp up - and the CDC was no exception at the beginning of the pandemic.

In their blerp, they said the did not trust the numbers coming from the government. Now they do. In round about words.

I think they're right - early on, in addition to the delay in the CDC ramping up its bureaucracy, the Trump admin appeared meddlesome in controlling, and sometimes attempting to muzzle the free flow of data.

[mike]

The Covid tracking project is shutting down in 5 days. The Atlantic is who was behind it. While I appreciate the work, I wonder why they chose now. I read their statement that they planned to do it for a month at first then it became a year and March 7 is the anniversary of that year. Since The Atlantic is so political, I immediately suspect it has to do with the incoming admin and they not wanting to track things. This is just an assumption and may be unfair. Maybe there was some altruistic purposes, but it makes me question of some of the interpretation they did would be slanted. Yes, they had to interpret data. That always leaves room for human ... error.

I think it has worked well enough for us to get a picture though, so we can be appreciative of the work that was done.

Interesting. I imagine it is an expensive thing for an organization to do. Apparently there were hundreds of people involved in the project. If they were just doing the same thing that government entities were doing (presumably collecting and charting data reported by state governments) then it makes sense at some point to just stop.

[RZehr]

The Covid tracking project is shutting down in 5 days. The Atlantic is who was behind it. While I appreciate the work, I wonder why they chose now. I read their statement that they planned to do it for a month at first then it became a year and March 7 is the anniversary of that year. Since The Atlantic is so political, I immediately suspect it has to do with the incoming admin and they not wanting to track things. This is just an assumption and may be unfair. Maybe there was some altruistic purposes, but it makes me question of some of the interpretation they did would be slanted. Yes, they had to interpret data. That always leaves room for human ... error.

I think it has worked well enough for us to get a picture though, so we can be appreciative of the work that was done.

Politics. They’d be more than happy to spend if there was a political angle to promote.

[Dan Z]

Numbers are all still improving. The recent hiccups in the downward trends apparently have to do with reporting lags over the president's day holiday, the power outages in Texas, and other things.

I was wondering about the sudden leveling off of both deaths and cases for the past 10 days. What you are saying is that weather and President's Day caused an initial artificial drop in reporting which had to catch up in the following days. I think that explains what was happening in deaths especially, which I expect to continue to drop since vaccines are targeting the most vulnerable.

I still wonder about cases though, which have leveled off at about 60k per day for the last 10 days - It concerns me because that is still a relatively high number (near the peak of the summer wave levels), and I wonder if it is a result of the variants spreading combined with some easing. Anecdotally, my Nurse Practitioner daughter is recently seeing an uptick in cases at her clinic once again. I'd feel more at ease if it would continue to drop again - but the vaccine will impacts death rates well before it impacts case rates.

On the positive side, it looks like folks are really ramping up plans to begin gathering again later this spring. Beginning with April, at the retreat center and summer camp I run, it looks like there will be a return to near normal levels of occupancy after a year of almost total absence of groups. After months of little activity, we are taking calls regularly now for events, turning some away even due to high occupancy.

FYI, I found this interesting - our booking patterns are a microcosm of how different groups of folks are relating to future planning. Here is the general order in which folks have begun to call to book retreats for the coming months:

• Individual Families - all along
• Family Reunions - beginning to call in December
• Rural Church Group - Beginning in January
• Immigrant Church Groups - Beginning in February
• National Youth Organizations (e.g. 4-H) - Beginning Mid-February
• Suburban Evangelical Church Groups - Just now beginning to call
• Urban & Mainline/Liberal Churches - Not yet booking

This order makes sense to me sociologically in terms of how these groups relate to pandemic risks

[Bootstrap]

The Covid tracking project is shutting down in 5 days. The Atlantic is who was behind it. While I appreciate the work, I wonder why they chose now. I read their statement that they planned to do it for a month at first then it became a year and March 7 is the anniversary of that year. Since The Atlantic is so political, I immediately suspect it has to do with the incoming admin and they not wanting to track things. This is just an assumption and may be unfair. Maybe there was some altruistic purposes, but it makes me question of some of the interpretation they did would be slanted. Yes, they had to interpret data. That always leaves room for human ... error.

I think it has worked well enough for us to get a picture though, so we can be appreciative of the work that was done.

Interesting. I imagine it is an expensive thing for an organization to do. Apparently there were hundreds of people involved in the project. If they were just doing the same thing that government entities were doing (presumably collecting and charting data reported by state governments) then it makes sense at some point to just stop.

Exactly. If you use the Wayback machine, you can see why they created this site in the first place. Really, it's the CDC's job. They should be able to gather the official statistics and publish them without political interference.

Here's the original home page for the Covid Tracking Project. It says the CDC should be doing this and isn't. It is now.