As the first long weekend of the summer, it’s a big day for barbecues, at least places I’ve lived.
Everywhere I’ve lived, too (not counting off the US bases while overseas). Memorial Day weekend always started BBQ season and Labor Day always ended it. Which reminds me of one of my favorite Married…with Children episodes: Hot Off The Grill.
I don’t know how well the states mentioned here (particularly Wisconsin?) would fit the bill, but wouldn’t one generally expect there to be a set of states that were ‘last to receive the spread’, as it were? It does seem like there has been a clear enough such phenomenon in the US this year, with the Northeast kicking things off and the good old heartland waiting their turn.
Take a look at the graphs. These aren’t “the last to receive” anything. They had their big peak followed by a dying down of infections. What caught my eye is not that the cases were increasing, but that the SHOT UP FAST.
If you haven’t looked at the chart, go do so before you comment further
I see that Texas has a big sudden spike, too, but in that case the spike doesn’t go higher than the previous peak. At least not yet.
Texas must have done something weird in their reporting. That spike is far too massive in one day to be just by chance.
That’s the case for the spikes in Wisconsin, Utah, and Puerto Rico, too. And they’re all on the same day in those states. they can’t all be weird reporting.
Look at the individual states by clicking on the boxes – the thumbnail images are misleading, and don’t tell the whole story.
In other news, I see that cases are rising alarmingly in France, Spain, and especially the UK:
Add me to the folks who go to family BBQs on Memorial Day and Labor Day in normal years.
It’s also a huge time here in Tucson, at least, for people to stay at a local resort. They play in the pool, drink excessively and make night audit fantasize about owning and using an AK-47.
I’m looking here: An interactive visualization of COVID-19 | 91-DIVOC
For Texas, we see 5,067 cases for Sunday 9/20, then we see 21,771 for Monday 9/21. That’s an over 4x increase. I’m pretty sure that’s due to some block of uncounted cases somehow finding their way into the system all on the same day.
Did the same thing happen in the other three states I named?
No. They all are increasing, but none of them show the same kind of astronomical jump Texas is showing.
They show bigger jumps – Texas’ jump doesn’t exceed its previous high, but the ones in Wisconsin, Utah and Puerto Rico do. As I say, the sudden peak in Wisconsin is THREE TIMES the previous high.
For the record, I’m looking at “New Confirmed Cases per Day”
I see now what you’re talking about.
Wisconsin spiked on Friday 9/18, but the numbers went right back down to where they were over the next three days.
Puerto Rico spiked on Saturday 9/19 and and went back down to where it was before over the next 3 days.
Utah’s numbers go up for 3 days (no one-day spike) peaking on Friday 9/18 and then go back down to where they were over 3 days.
Texas’ previous high was 16,017 on 7/16. This high is 21,771 and the previous day reported 5,067. This is by FAR the highest one-day number seen anywhere, even California. I expect that number to drop back to where it was, probably over the next 3 days. I suspect all these states are doing some sort of correction to their numbers. Or some lab backed up all their tests and hadn’t reported anything in a week.
I normally look just at the 7-day average, but this one-day Texas spike was so vast it even showed up there as an unusual jump.
I had looked at your link (and now have in greater depth, so I hope I’m not disobeying you). If you don’t think the states as a whole show temporal trends by region, then I don’t know what to tell you. Click on any of those amber colored ones to the left of middle and try to eyeball a general trend line. I think you are making too much of a short-term downward trend in one of those three states that you highlighted, as opposed to taking a broader view of the overall trends at large.
Such parties, whether family reunions or not and whether involving barbecue or not, are also very common around here.
For summer people, it’s often the last week they’re up here. For locals, it’s the last weekend before school starts, and traditionally the tail end of summer weather though in practice the weather’s erratic. And it’s a long weekend. Of course it turns into a party.
Every year, there are people grumbling about how it’s supposed to be a solemn memorial, not an excuse for sales and parties. But in practice, it’s mostly about sales and parties.
I think you’re being misleading in your description. The Wisconsin rise takes it well above the level it had been at three days before, and it remained well above that on the next day. There’s clearly a rising trend behind the more variable single-day shifts… Similarly, Puerto Rico’s peak on September 19 is significantly above the levels of Sept 13-15, where it had been after its broad peak at the beginning of August, but the couple of days before the 19th and on the 20th are also significantly higher than the trend had been. There’s clearly something going on there.
Texas’ case is fast, and there’s not enough data to tell if this is a statistical fluke or not – the next couple of days will tell.
It’s not a matter of disobeying – I’m not the headmaster – but too many people are simply asserting that the trends are simply going up or down in a matter-of-fact way that seems to indicate that they aren’t noting the speed with which the cases are going up, or how high they had risen.
Granted, statistical anomalies occur (like Massachusetts’ “negative cases” trend that’s still there), but clear indications of something of significance are there, too – as when I posted, before the news stories started, about the sudden sharp and high rises in cases on South Dakota and the surrounding states about two weeks after the Sturgis rally. What was different in this case is that the three sharp rises occurred in three places that were nowhere near each other. it might be statistics, but then it seems odd that it’s simultaneously appeared in three states.
And I don’t know what “downward trend” you’re talking about. I’m talking about a sharp uptick.
States sometimes reclassify the way they are counting positive cases and deaths. For example, look at Worldometers for the U.S., scroll down below the charts and expand September 22. They have a note about a bunch of corrections to the Texas totals, like “Older cases are being reported for several counties in Public Health Region 8 after DSHS staff identified 3,921 cases that had not previously been reported.”
Worldometers attempts to distribute those cases back on the dates they actually occurred, but sometimes that isn’t possible, and not every site does that. In those cases, you might see a huge spike in one day that doesn’t reflect actual daily results.
If you’re looking at the 3-day average, then we are looking at different numbers. The spike looks only 1/3 as big. If you look at one-day numbers the spike is massive and goes much, much higher than the previous highest. That’s why I’m saying it must have been some change in method or retroactive update, as TroutMan said.
I thought you had been especially concerned about Wisconsin’s sharp rise because their numbers had been trending downward for a little while before it.
As the exceptional USA has reached the benchmark of 200,000 dead, a Fark headline noted that a one second moment of silence for each dead American would last 55 and one half hours. I haven’t verified the math, I’m trusting Fark.