AZ Pandemic in Numbers for the Week Ending May 8

 


Here are the Arizona pandemic numbers for the week just ended:



It's good to see all the one-week change numbers going in the right direction again.  The only red spot is S-gene dropouts, which indicates the prevalence of the UK variant in the state. But I think there must be something wrong with the dashboard where this data is reported, because we shouldn't be able to get more than 100 dropouts per 100 tests. I am inquiring with the publishers.  

Meanwhile, speaking of getting things wrong...

Major Correction

I have been making an error in the vaccination percentages, and by extension the accelerator back to January when I started making these weekly reports.  I thought the JHU dashboard, where I get the vaccination data, was reporting number of people with one or more shots, and people fully vaccinated.  The other day I noticed that the first figure is the number of doses, not the number of people with at least one shot.  

I regret the error and have corrected it this week and for the accelerator going back to January.  The people with one or more shots is an estimate, which I get by deducting two times the number of people fully vaccinated (because they require two doses) from the number of doses.  That gives the doses not accounted for by the fully vaccinated folks.  I add that number to the number fully vaccinated and turn it into a percent of the population.  It may be slightly inaccurate depending on the number of Johnson & Johnson shots given (it only takes one dose).

In any case the percent fully vaccinated has been accurate all along. But I've felt it was important to give the number with any shot because the first shot confers quite a bit of protection from the virus.

Here is the corrected accelerometer:

Both lines are declining, and the any shot line is now below the both shots line.  Bear in mind that these lines represent the change in percentages over a week and not the percent itself.  That always goes up for both. The crossover, which happened three weeks ago, probably reflects the leading edge of the "vaccine wall" where demand from those eager to get the vaccination is dropping off.

One other change is that for April 10 there was an anomaly in the data where there was zero change in the both shots line and a huge spike in the any shot line. This appeared to be a problem with the data where the both shots numbers were added to the doses numbers.  

I took care of this using something called "imputation," which is a common way of dealing with missing data.  I set the April 10 figures for both lines to the average of the April 3 and April 17 values.

Top Image by Shutterbug75 from Pixabay

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