The Florida slow-roll

You've probably heard in the news about what a hard time many states are having with the Delta surge, with schools having to close, ICU's overfilled, people denied care for other health problems because there's not hospital capacity, etc.

Ground Zero of this preventable catastrophe is ... Florida.

So you go to some data site like Worldometers, and you look at how things are going in Florida and:

From here, downloaded Sep. 12, 2021

Sure, they recently reached their highest daily death rate in the course of the pandemic, but since the peak on August 24th, things have been improving incredibly fast.

Here's another screenshot, focusing in on that end of the graph:

That's fantastic improvement!

Except that it's nothing more than a delay in reporting COVID-19 death data.

I would look in on the Florida page every two to four days, and it also seemed like they had recently peaked, and then things started getting better.


So on August 24th (as it happens) I started transcribing the day-by-day death stats for Florida off of Worldometers, checking back every couple of days to transcribe a new batch.


I somewhat arbitrarily chose July 30th as my starting point, opened up a new spreadsheet, and typed in the data from July 30th to August 24th.


Like on the Worldometers chart, I calculated the 7-day average, and the graph came out like this:





You can see the death rate peaking on August 11th, then falling very impressively, from 178 all the way down to 28, in just 13 days. Remarkable progress.


But let me re-scale that, so that there will be room for the later curves I'm going to have to add:





It's the identical data, just with the vertical axis allowed to rise all the way to 350, and the horizontal axis running out through September 9th.


I went back on August 27th, and the peak was a little later, and a little higher. That downturn after August 11th turned out not to be true:




That had been a Friday. I went back two days later, on Sunday, and the first two weeks of the death curve were unchanged from Friday, but the last seven days had all been bumped up:





Two days later, the whole peak had been raised. The peak now didn't come until August 16th, at 221 deaths per day.




After that, I missed five days. When I came back, the peak hadn't been pushed any later, but it had been raised, and a lot more deaths had been added to previously recorded days after that peak.





When I gathered data on September 8th, the peak had been pushed back to August 21st, and raised somewhat.





Friday, September 10th, saw a big jump and the peak not happening until August 24th.




Today, September 12th, and went and got the numbers again. Like August 27th and 29th I had a Friday-to-Sunday pair. And like that time, most of the curve was left unchanged from Friday to Sunday, with the update only affecting the last seven days of the curve.




I fully expect that if I go back on Tuesday, the entire curve will have been lifted again. The pattern over the last two weeks suggests that, even though the reported data show a decline in deaths, the underlying reality is that they're not done increasing their death rate in Florida.


I should take a moment to address one question that will be obvious to some readers: Is this a big deal? Isn't this just a function of data taking time to compile?


Maybe.


My best argument is that I've been looking at data for many states for a while (particularly for the nine states that featured in my previous post), and none of them have this obvious a rosy scenario. They report their data, and aside from a few small updates, their data don't keep drifting higher.


Just today I started the process of a small check on my impression, by gathering today's death data for New York state, starting likewise on July 30th. In a week or so, I should be able to tell if NY is doing something like what Florida has been doing.


I doubt it will be that dramatic.


In the meantime, we can count up how many deaths Florida had failed do count on August 24th, compared to their report today.





On August 24th (indicated by vertical, black lines), there were a reported 2,907 COVID-19 deaths in Florida.


Today, not quite three weeks later, that total number of reported COVID-19 deaths from July 30th through August 24th has more than doubled, to 6,187.


That particular window (through August 24th) might be just about ready to stop getting worse.


Stay tuned.